How often do you think doctors let people die when they could have been saved?

[grump]

So we all generally believe or at least we want to believe that doctors are all living saints who heroically struggle to save each and everyone of their patients to the bitter end or at least as far as is reasonably possible. But is that really true or is it bullshit?

Not necessarily talking about outright obvious negligence or incompetence. And not talking about situations where the patient/family explicitly requests to be allowed to go. Just situations where maybe the doc could have gone the extra mile to save someone but didn't.

Especially in hospitals with doctors in life or death situations they're churning through people at factory level numbers, its not to hard to see how even a person who started with good intentions could become jaded and start to want to get people in and out efficiently. Maybe there was this additional operation that they could do but they didn't want the major hassle it would cause. Or perhaps there was this new cutting edge therapy they had heard of but it would be a ton of headache for not a lot of gain and a ton of paperwork and they just keep it to themselves and let the patient expire and nobody questions them because either they don't think they have the expertise or they actually don't have the expertise to.

 

[Nicholas Gur]

I've heard an important variable to consider is their organ donator status. If wagie is on the table with a fresh liver and Bankerstien Fiatberg III is in the other room needing a transplant you can probably guess how much that hippocratic oath means in that moment.

 

[Kiwi Yuga]

Remember when doctors were going to pull the plug on a kid because he was an organ donor, and the father held the doctors at gunpoint until his son woke up?

https://www.click2houston.com/news/2015/12/18/father-son-involved-in-hospital-standoff-speak-to-kprc-2/

It is more likely than you think. I removed the organ donor status from my license when I started hearing stories about this. They'll still probably try to harvest my organs if I am in a coma or similar state though.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

Does your question take economizing and triaging into account?
For instance, if a doctor were able to exist and act at different locations simultaneously, then that doctor could in theory work every second to save the lives of 8 billion people on this planet. But the reality is that doctors are scarce, time is scarce, and locations are scarce.
So I feel like your question necessarily equivocates between a moral or pragmatic quandary and a purely praxeological one

 

[mindlessobserver]

These sorts of questions veer perilously close to madness and beg hypothetical scenarios that cannot be proven as they essentially ask you to prove the negative.

Could the doctor have done more if a patient died? Sure. More could always have been done. Would it have helped? Impossible to know!

This is why Doctors like all professionals have standards of practice that are mandated by their governing bodies. So long as the doctor sticks to them he or she is not doing anything unethical.

Because there is the reverse negative. Say they do, "do more", and stray outside the standard practices. The patient dies. Would the patient have died without that extreme efforts? Or did the extreme efforts cause the death? Who knows!

 

[Dagoth AMOGUS]

There probably is a school of thought among doctors for assisted suicide, but they would never say that out loud unless they wanted to scare away patients.

There are sneaky ways I’ve heard of, like how a doctor will leave the room before telling the nurse the combination to the morphine drip machine loud enough for the terminal patient to hear on purpose.

 

[grump]

Does your question take economizing and triaging into account?
For instance, if a doctor were able to exist and act at different locations simultaneously, then that doctor could in theory work every second to save the lives of 8 billion people on this planet. But the reality is that doctors are scarce, time is scarce, and locations are scarce.
So I feel like your question necessarily equivocates between a moral or pragmatic quandary and a purely praxeological one

In this case I'm talking more on an individual choice level rather than could society have more efficiently organized doctors although these questions partially overlap.

The event that partially triggered this question was I had a procedure that through a quirk of regulations I could have saved thousands of dollars and the doctor would have been paid the same AFAIK if it had just been classified another way in the paperwork. But for whatever reason he and his staff never brought it up and just let me eat the additional cost. Now maybe he wasn't aware of this technicality but given he/his office specializes in this procedure and did a zillion of them it sort of beggars belief. Now you're regularly running into docs who don't give a shit in relatively minor things like this, how many would you run across that don't give a shit in the big things?

 

[Troonos]

I don't know, but I wish as a society we'd stop saving people in overdose.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

Now maybe he wasn't aware of this technicality but given he/his office specializes in this procedure and did a zillion of them it sort of beggars belief. Now you're regularly running into docs who don't give a shit in relatively minor things like this, how many would you run across that don't give a shit in the big things?

Time is limited, as is human brainpower and energy.
Recently I had a doctor suggest I take magnesium, and they gave me a prescription for some basic bitch magnesium supplements. I replied that I already have different magnesium supplements with a different compound because the basic bitch magnesium supplements are proven to be way less effective in terms of absorption by the human body. The doctor was unaware of this.
It would not surprise me if there will be a point where not using a LLM (read: a mechanical aid that is able to learn and retrieve way more knowledge than a typical worker's brain) will be a professional risk for doctors

 

[ZazietheBeast]

Tragically common. Take Kaiser Permanente for example here in Commiefornia. Their facilities are cheap, their doctors, DEI hires. There is the unfortunate fact that advanced treatments from Europe (Combination, Immunotherapy and Phage) are simply not available there. There's a reason why Chemo (Or what it really is, monotherapy) is recommended as the preferred cancer treatment. Its insanely profitable. Patient gets weaker, they get more cash just to keep them alive and if they 'beat' the cancer, congratulations, you are still going to need aftercare so you hopefully revert back to normal. This is also the kind of place that will tell you if you have stage 3 or 4, you're fucking dead. When in reality, its all about finding the correct clinic.

The harsh reality is there are cheaper and more effective treatments but they're not going to do it because it doesn't make green line go up. Vid related. Yes, its by that very same Hey Hey People man.

Sseth even points out that Hospitals will even deny access to fatties when they're on death's door simply because they're a guaranteed liability. Their chances of surviving their sudden affliction is low and if they're admitted, the hospital can get sued by grieving (or opportunistic) family members. If they died outside, Hospital gets no problems since they can always claim, "There's nothing we could do".

 

[I Shidded I Farded I Came]

More often than you'd hope but good luck coming by stats for it. If it is any comfort you are more likely to be actively killed by retarded decisions. There are nurses that will just give you what is on the chart even if multiple doctors (who themselves did not read the chart) have prescribed a regimen of drugs that would kill an elephant. You would probably be shocked (again, if there were stats for it) at the number of people killed by those innocuous little IV bags most inpatients are hooked up to without a second thought.

 

[Troonos]

Time is limited, as is human brainpower and energy.
Recently I had a doctor suggest I take magnesium, and they gave me a prescription for some basic bitch magnesium supplements. I replied that I already have different magnesium supplements with a different compound because the basic bitch magnesium supplements are proven to be way less effective in terms of absorption by the human body. The doctor was unaware of this.
It would not surprise me if there will be a point where not using a LLM (read: a mechanical aid that is able to learn and retrieve way more knowledge than a typical worker's brain) will be a professional risk for doctors

No thanks. ChatGPT told me that the word превысокомногорассмотрительствующий has the letter Р eleven times. I don't think I trust it to make medical decisions.

 

[Justice Tony]

I've heard an important variable to consider is their organ donator status. If wagie is on the table with a fresh liver and Bankerstien Fiatberg III is in the other room needing a transplant you can probably guess how much that hippocratic oath means in that moment.

This is why I smoke and drink heavily. No reason to let me die when my organs are unusable.

It is more likely than you think. I removed the organ donor status from my license when I started hearing stories about this. They'll still probably try to harvest my organs if I am in a coma or similar state though.

The trick is to fuck up your organs with poor lifestyle choices. That way you can still feel good about yourself without actually putting yourself at risk.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

There's a concerning amount of doctors that either don't know what the signs of sepsis are or are too prideful to care. Just one doctor not knowing is concerning. Used to listen to videos about medical malpractice and it was horrifying how many doctors in one girl's case had no idea what was going on with her. Poor kid died in horrible pain because everyone in that hellhole either didn't know or had too much pride to admit they were wrong.

I wouldn't recommend getting into true crime podcasts about medical malpractice if you have anger issues. Had to stop because of that. Odd how stories about people being brutally tortured by random assholes are less enraging than stories about people being brutally tortured by doctors.

 

[Neodanthril]

it somewhat depends on the race but also the kind of person that gets into medicine. if they are white they are either a christian or an incarnation of patrick bateman. dentists are by far the worst about fucking their customers. msnbc used to run shows all day about grifters and a lot of them were dentists. one in particular would just do whatever the fuck he wanted, up to and including drilling holes in peoples head and charging them for the privilege. always get a second opinion before getting a filling.

advanced treatments from Europe

another great example of excellent treatments that europeans can get but americans cant have insurance pay for is sublingual allergy drops. it is literally just a regimen for putting bespoke drops under your tounge and micro dosing your allergies to build up a tolerance. but its not fda approved so fuck you says the insurance man. instead go to the doctor every two weeks so they can use an expensive doohickey to stab 40 needles in your back for like a year.

 

[Otterly]

So we all generally believe or at least we want to believe that doctors are all living saints who heroically struggle to save each and everyone of their patients to the bitter end

Have you ever actually met doctors?? As in worked with them and lived with them and taught them? Or god forbid had to be treated by them??
Doing this will disabuse you of any kind of thoughts that they’re all living saints.
Medicine attracts a few kinds of people.
-Idealists; most get that smacked out of them hard. A few manage to keep it and these are the ones you might say are the good guys
-Daddy is a surgeon so I am too types. Possibly the majority. They are expected to be doctors or they see it as the best thing to do
-Psychos, in it for the things it lets you do
-Sociopaths , in it for the money
They’re treated like crap for long hours and shifts, while being told they are super special do they don’t rebel. This feeds the ego.
They let people die all the time. Through ignorance, error, tiredness, or just because of budget constraints. There is no bedside manner. Zero care of patients. Only a callous disregard .
There are good doctors out there - they are not the majority.

 

[Dawdler]

Medical malpractice is 3rd leading cause of death in US

https://ankinlaw.com/do-doctors-kill-more-than-guns/

"With medical errors contributing to thousands of deaths in the U.S. annually, statistics suggest doctors kill more than guns. Gun violence caused about 49,000 fatalities in the U.S. in 2021."

 

[ZazietheBeast]

another great example of excellent treatments that europeans can get but americans cant have insurance pay for is sublingual allergy drops. it is literally just a regimen for putting bespoke drops under your tounge and micro dosing your allergies to build up a tolerance. but its not fda approved so fuck you says the insurance man. instead go to the doctor every two weeks so they can use an expensive doohickey to stab 40 needles in your back for like a year.

And the crappy part about all of this, many burgers blindly trust the medical system and the insurance system. Never once realizing they're paying a chunk of their life savings for shoddy service. Sure, there are those who realize they're getting fleeced. But they do not know how hard.

The Burger medical system needs a DOGE big time because the way it works right now is no different from a scam.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

A lot, I suspect that was the case with my family, but good luck finding a lawyer (maybe I'm just bad at it)...

 

[WickyWickyWoW]

And the crappy part about all of this, many burgers blindly trust the medical system and the insurance system. Never once realizing they're paying a chunk of their life savings for shoddy service. Sure, there are those who realize they're getting fleeced. But they do not know how hard.

The Burger medical system needs a DOGE big time because the way it works right now is no different from a scam.

The problem is the extreme degree of corruption in the American political system. Health care reform has been a hot button issue at this point generationally. Every effort is either shot down or contorted with bought politicians, remember one of the UHC bigwhigs (Thompson?) outright said they own Nancy pelosi, that same company saw their stock price rise dramatically in the years after Obamacare. People were practically dancing in the street when Thompson got adjusted because of the objective corruption and fact that a considerable chunk of the country has experienced suffering and avoidable tragedy to their families because of these subhumans. Trying to fix the insurance system is taking on the juggernaut of American political corruption