The physicians wore lab coats Saturday as they stood on a street corner and offered medical notes to the tens of thousands of protesters who paraded past them. The protesters were rallying against a Republican-backed state bill that would eliminate collective bargaining rights for most state workers.
One of the doctors was Lou Sanner, 59, who practices family medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Sanner said he gave out hundreds of notes and that many protesters with whom he spoke seemed to be suffering from stress.
“Some people think it’s a nod-and-a-wink thing but it’s not,” he told The Associated Press on Sunday. “One of the biggest stresses in life is the threat of loss of income, loss of job, loss of health insurance. People have actually been getting ill from this, or they can’t sleep.”
Er, what? Sanner wants to seriously argue that these teachers were too ill and sleep-deprived to teach their classes, but were perfectly OK to spend hours marching and protesting in cold weather over the same period of time?
(Hot Air)
Some medical licenses need to be reviewed.
Update:
After viewing the videos at my request last night, Dr. Arthur Derse called me up exclaiming, “Holy mackerel! It’s much worse than it looked in the paper. I’m stunned, absolutely stunned.” Dr. Derse is the Director of Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities a the Medical College of Wisconsin. “When all’s said and done, it’s really the profession of medicine that has the black eye in this case,” he says.
There is no question these doctors are masking political opinion in the white coat of the medical profession, Dr. Derse believes. “The videos are pretty damning.”
It’s sad, but what puzzles me most is how in the world three of the four physicians I can identify from these videos and other media reports are faculty members of UW’s Family Medicine department, and one is a senior resident in that same department. It’s a good training program, committed to providing sorely-needed primary care doctors to the state of Wisconsin. It teaches professionalism, and its faculty are supposed to model integrity. What were they thinking?
They’ve managed to belittle a public trust between physicians, employers and patients. A doctor’s sick note is a serious document. It represents an employer’s desire to verify through a respected, independent, medically qualified third party the fact of an illness and the true need for convalescence. In the videos now circulating online, we witness multiple members of a noted family medicine department trash one of the well-recognized rights and privileges of their profession, with little forethought as to the consequences.
Those doctors' notes are almost as worthless as some of the diplomas Wisconsin high school kids are getting.
Posted by: proof | February 21, 2011 at 06:34 PM