Friend or Foe?

This blog has begun with several negative, even hostile encounters with our nation's medical profession. Consequently, it is fitting and proper to question the author's underlying motivation. Am I the doctor's friend or foe?

It is rapidly approaching fifty years since I was pronounced to be a professional and a member of a time-honored profession. Society is fortunate that few persons so honored dishonor that privileged status by transgressions. Most medical and dental professionals strive to do good.

I love and respect my profession (dentistry), my specialty (oral surgery) and my co-profession (medicine) as much as one can. Love, however, demands confrontation when the subject of that love appears to be on a path toward self-destruction. When it comes to the review of questionable patient care, doctors have always been their own worst enemy.

Society passively, and federal and state governments actively, have rewarded our nation's medical profession with far too much self-regulation and control. The results have been disastrous for all. Medical practice is the least regulated economic activity in America - and always has been. That is a theme which will constantly reappear in future blogs until some authority can prove otherwise.

Attention for this blog must be refocused on the author's underlying motivation: friend or foe?

Our cuture has recognized, named, and classified a fairly new response when loved ones appear to be on a pathway leading to self-destruction. It is called intervention. Uniquely, in this instance, one person (author) is seeking to perform an intervention with the many (medical profession) as an act of love. I am NOT the enemy!

Interventions, however, require harsh truths be told and in so doing one can easily be preceived as the "enemy" when the exact opposite is the intent.

I was recently speaking with the healthcare guru on the staff of one of South Carolina's Senators. The question arose, "Was I intending to confront doctors with my thesis, doctors are the only cause of the long-standing medical malpractice crisis and doctors are the only cure for that crisis?" That does seem to be the currently acceptable mechanism used in interventions, confront the misguided in the hope of redirecting them to a more beneficial mode of conduct.

Is there a gentle manner in which learned individuals can be made to understand that their entire profession has traveled a self-destructive pathway, medical malpractice litigation, and that their only professional salvation can be found in medical peer review? All such recommendations would be gratefully taken in to advisement.

Therefore, thsoe who might view the author's intent as hostile and uncaring would be mistaken. A more loving attempt at the intervention of an entire profession can not be found.

Jacques Barzun, who wrote the 800 page From Dawn to Decadence, 500 years of Western Cultured Life after age 90, also wrote in The Profession's Under Siege, Harpers Magazine, 1978 the following quote,

"What all the professions need today is critics from inside, men who know what the conditions are, and also the arguments and excuses, and in a full sweep over the field can offer their fellow practitioners a new vision of the profession as an institution."

I can offer a new vision for the medical profession.