What is professional misconduct? To me, it includes, of course, the double, and triple billing such as apparently went on at Enron. It also should include misinformation, exploitation, lack of forthrightness, and deception. Especially in the medical profession. Believe me, it happens. I am one of thousands who have forfeited their health for life, based on misinformation, and deception by the medical community. I have adhesive arachnoiditis, a spinal cord injury that 'does not exist', that is too rare to happen, nothing is known about it, 'is too controversial to diagnose' and any of a half dozen other inaccurate descriptions. Only recently have I discovered the vast extent of its existence. To me, professional MEDICAL misconduct is defined by what I am about to tell you. This is the personification of medical misconduct.
What makes medical professional misconduct all the more galling is, financial transaction misconduct usually applies to the exchange of money alone. When you depend on an anesthesiologist, a spine surgeon, a pain management expert, or neurosurgeon, to make recommendations and decisions for you, you are also depending on that person explicitly for honest, professional advice regarding your health and health for the rest of your life. You are gambling with your health. Something, that, in this case, cannot be recovered, if lost. The expectation of honest, clear, and concise communication is guaranteed by the Hippocratic Oath to first do no harm. The Hippocratic Oath also implies honesty and ethical behavior, by the physician.
What, then, to think, when you discover that Oath meant nothing, or worse, that it could be set aside or abrogated, for the financial gain of the doctor? How so you ask? Spine patients are given diagnostics such as myelogramCTs, which carry a risk of arachnoiditis. Early pantopaque dye gave as many as 60% of recipients sterile arachnoiditis. Epidural steroids using the current steroid media, depo medrol, kenalog, celestone soluspan, all known neurotoxins, also have preservatives that also can give arachnoiditis.
When modern spine injury patients go to orthopaedists, neurosurgeons, and pain management doctors (anesthesiologists for the most part), some of the very first things done are diagnostics (using omnipaque, a descendant of pantopaque, a known neurotoxin), then often spinal epidural steroids, and other invasive procedures. These procedures carry a risk. Several risks, actually. One of which is arachnoiditis. Or, in its advanced form, adhesive arachnoiditis. According to published statistics, 16% of spine patients end up with arachnoiditis. How many of us receiving myelograms or epidural steroids (ESI) are warned of these incurable risks in advance? Virtually none.
One can go to Google Books, look up arachnoiditis, and find hundreds, and hundreds of medical texts describing and defining arachnoiditis. However, if you go to any doctors office, especially radiologists and anesthesiologists who do these procedures, and ask them about arachnoiditis, it does not exist, is an urban myth. No one knows anything about it. It is not a painful condition. Etc. I think you get the picture. Do an internet search on arachnoiditis. You will find thousands of responses. Doesn't matter which search engine you use. You will find plenty of us out there. Many of us are paraplegic, some quadriplegic. We have severe, lancinating, burning pain, that the strongest drugs in the world have a hard time treating. We have bladder and bowel malfunction, sexual dysfunction, incontinence. Some of us have severe headaches because the arach has gotten into our brains and compromised our CSF. We have damaged or obliterated lumbar or thoracic nerve root sheathes. That makes the slightest weather change, or movement, extraordinarily painful to a degree you cannot imagine.
If you look up ARAC support group, ASAMS, AASQA, COFWA (Circle of Friends with Arachnoiditis), Arachnoiditis.co.uk, etc, you will find thousands of us with identical stories. We were told these procedures were routine and safe. We were told they were effective, and we all ended up with this incurable, untreatable, hell on earth. Our doctors responses? Often, we are labeled as malingerers, fakers, somatoforic (psychosomatic) cases. We are stigmatized, and labelled as whiners and drug seekers. It is not uncommon for arachniacs to receive harsh lectures as to how we 'caused our own pain, and are personally responsible for our condition' when it was the DOCTOR that CAUSED THIS!!!
THIS is the response of absolute cowards. Doctors who are irresponsible, cowardly, and afraid to own up to what they have created, by ordering myelo after myelo, 10, 20 of 30 epidurals for the same person. It only takes one botched or bad epidural to land a patient with arachnoiditis for life. IT TAKES A REAL COWARD TO PRESCRIBE THESE PROCEDURES, CAUSE THIS TRAUMATIC AN INJURY, AND THEN BLAME THE PATIENT, LABEL THEM AS UNSTABLE OR PSYCHOSOMATIC, TO COVER FOR THE PHYSICIANS' OWN MISCONDUCT, and poor judgement in the handling of the case..
I urge any doubter out there: Look up arachnoiditis in Google Books. You will be shocked as to the
extraordinary amount of coverage in modern medical texts about this so called non- existent disease. It is one thing to lie, to deceive, and to profit off of patients illnesses. It is quite another matter to cause this much destruction, and shift the responsibility to the patient. In the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand. It happens. Anyone interested should look up these sites, these support groups, or the condition. And think twice before you have an epidural or myelogram.
The first thing modern medicine needs to do is FESS UP and atone for these transgressions. NEXT, they need to find diagnostic media, and new treatments which do not include neurotoxins which will damage or destroy nerve or spinal cord material. Finally, it needs to LEVEL with patients, and tell us the REAL truth for a change. Perhaps the information age will open up this can of worms and let some sunshine in. It is about time.
