Interesting and all too familiar kind of story. It's symptomatic of one of the biggest problems in medicine, which is easy to identify and hard to fix: how do we choose people to go into the profession and how do we govern them once there?Brive1987 wrote: ↑ Gary Fettke is one example. He’s an orthopaedic surgeon in Tasmania who got sick of amputations of T2D feet.
He stated criticising carb heavy diet recommendations and crap UPF Meals in his hospitals. He was targeted by the Dieticians association and from them the local medical board. He had to fight for two years to overturn his suspension- and was finally vindicated. His wife was leaked emails from the cereals representative body (intl heads of Kellogg’s etc represented) which had named him and five others to be specially targeted
Since then the pair has campaigned against Adventist “Garden of Eden” diet advocacy and manipulation.
https://isupportgary.com/about
We have made very silly rules for picking medical students. Some kind of selection must be made when there are 200 seemingly qualified applicants for each place. Choosing the smartest means clever doctors but not necessarily with caring personalities. Choosing the caring ones is far too open to manipulation (I listened to a niece describe how she and other applicants were choosing the most abject out-of-hours activities to buff up their applications - washing the feet of the homeless etc). Bizarrely, the rump of applicants who get in because a parent went to that medical school often turn out the best. At least they knew what they were getting into. Now we are busy lowering the admission bar for certain classes of applicants because we need to prove each class contains the right percentage of people from each ethnic group. That's going to work out well.
And as for governance, the kinds of shenanigans one reads about in the horror-comics sent out by malpractice insurers and the name-and-shame page on the website of each licensing body makes you realise just how badly we have picked the wrong people. And much as I approve of single-payer public healthcare, it alters the relationship between a physician and a patient enormously. A few years of people who feel their visit is free, and thus turn up with trivial and silly demands, will erode that sense of a duty owed to the person who is, in theory, hiring you to do a job. Pick and train your doctors to be technicians, and you find patients being treated like the customers of the mechanics at a lube and brake shop. So then the governance becomes heavy-handed to try to protect what shreds of respect the public might still have for the profession. As you correctly divined, this ends all individuality, inventiveness and out-of-the-box thinking, with a tendency to follow guidelines closely for fear of criticism, and no room for custom tailoring care.
The one thing I do know, being more on the receiving end these days is that I far prefer a smart doctor to a nice doctor. No amount of jovial bonhomie makes up for not knowing what you're about and being willing to make the effort to do it.