Lack of quality care provided by doctors and nurses may worsen prognosis of patients with serious complications, study shows

Saturday, October 06, 2012 by: PF Louis
Tags: doctors, patient care, medical complications

(NaturalNews) A recent study headed by Dr. Jeroen Ludikhuize at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam determined that a majority of inner hospital crisis situations could have been avoided with closer attention to obvious patient deterioration.

Crisis situations studied were unplanned ICU (intensive care unit) visits and CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation). By reviewing 47 patients' cases with whom crisis interventions were required in Dutch hospitals, Dr. Ludikhuize and his team observed that almost 70 percent of those ICU and CPR episodes could have been avoided several hours or even a day or two before they happened.

This study led to a simple conclusion reported in the journal Critical Care Medicine: Better attention is necessary to avoid crisis situations in hospitals that are both expensive and subject to greater risk.

Since all the doctors and nurses involved with the cases studied were interviewed by the research team, it was also determined that too many doctors and nurses don't like to admit errors in judgment or even consider using constructive self criticism.

Dr. Jeremy Kahn, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who was not involved with the study agreed. "Individual clinicians, when confronted with an adverse error that they may be responsible for, are relatively unlikely to allow themselves to think critically about their care," said Kahn.

What is medical standard of care and who decides that?

Here's an excerpt from the online free dictionary (legal): ... the watchfulness, attention, caution and prudence that a reasonable person in the circumstances would exercise. ... Failure to meet the standard is negligence, and any damages resulting therefrom may be claimed in a lawsuit by the injured party.

The problem is that standard is subjective. One renegade doctor bluntly stated that standard of care is nothing more than what everyone in the medical field is doing. It's merely a consensual standard.

Nevertheless, this is the framework to help decide courtroom malpractice cases, or for medical board bureaucrats to remove a medical license from a genuinely helpful physician who is curing patients outside the consensual standard of care's limitations.

In the case of malpractice hearings, expert witnesses (doctors) are asked to review a grievance from a patient or patient's family about alleged medical incompetence resulting in complications or death.

In this situation, would it be fair to say that the expert testimony may not be as critical as the plaintiff desires? Plausible deniability is probable unless the situation is overtly outrageous.

A lot of things that most allopathic practitioners consider standard treatments create adverse effects. Thousands of patients prescribed fluoroquinolone-based antibiotics are in grave condition from the adverse effects of those antibiotics. (http://www.naturalnews.com)

Many are permanently incapacitated, wheel chair bound and in severe pain after being prescribed fluoroquinolone antibiotics, such as Cipro, for minor infections.

PBS News Hour covered the fluoroquinolone adverse effects crisis. A pharmacology professor interviewed commented that practitioners shouldn't use canons to kill a fly. (http://healthmaven.blogspot.com)

In other words, powerful fluoroquinolone antibiotics should be used for very serious situations only. Of course, that's questionable as well. But that expert's statement should make those physicians technically culpable for violating standard of care.

Yet, the only recourse these poor victims can hope for is a successful class action suit against the pharmaceutical companies. Those doctors are protected by the standard of care rule - their standard of care. They all prescribe antibiotics for everything.

But - if an MD actually cures cancer with any non-toxic, non-pharmaceutical protocol, the MD's medical license is revoked. Standard of care embraces the worst type of medical treatments while excluding effective, natural solutions.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.reuters.com

http://jco.ascopubs.org/content/27/32/e192.full

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/standard+of+care