Authorities finally brought the physician in question, Larry Nasser, to justice and sentenced him for multiple felony offenses against patients all over the state. This resulted in him receiving a sentence that could exceed 100 years in prison.

How could this have happened in a world where patients are supposed to trust their physicians, particularly their gynecologists? This medical specialty, as well as urology, gives the physician unfettered access to patients. Urology is where male sexual abuse occurs. How many men come forward with allegations of rape or sexual abuse by a physician?

The prestigious Columbia University paid out millions to abused patients and, curiously, the physician in question (Robert Hadden) had a prior charge of sexual abuse that was lowered and, according to The New York Times, the prosecutor “agreed to not seek prison time and promised not to pursue new sexual abuse allegations against him. His sex-offender status was reduced so that it would end after 20 years and his name would not be on an online list of offenders.” But his case is not the only one where a sexual abuser is permitted to remain free and practice medicine.

I was prompted to write this article today after seeing a media article about a female gynecologist who had been catfishing other women on an Internet dating platform where she presented herself as a man. The physician is still working at a reputable medical center, where management has decided the issue is irrelevant since she stopped doing it and was only engaged in that activity about a decade ago. A sociologist later discovered the charade and transformed it into a bestseller.

The Actions of Medical Boards

Medical boards are expected not only to uphold the standards of care but also to provide a layer of protection for both patients and practitioners. However, too often this is not the case, and I have been told by several physicians that certain state medical boards are less than vigorous in these regards. Patients soon learn that they will be given short shrift when expressing concerns about a physician’s behavior toward them.

Even though there is an explicit ban on doctors having sexual interactions with their patients, some physicians nevertheless abuse their patients sexually. No one knows how many doctors in the United States have sexually abused their patients. Only a small percentage of doctors have had “reportable” repercussions due to their unethical practices, according to data from the National Practitioner Data Bank on unfavorable disciplinary actions by state medical boards, institutional sanctions for peer review, and malpractice payouts.

A lack of clarification of licensure, prior employment, and potential actions brought to bear against physicians by institutions, such as hospitals and medical centers, is required. However, that may not be the case in every instance. Such a failure to adequately assess someone’s prior employment, obviously led to the infamous Dr. Michael Swango going from state to state where he killed patients. One dean became suspicious and started calling other facilities, which led to the complete uncovering of his activities and his apprehension. He may have killed 60 patients.

The issue is of particular personal concern to me since a relative, after a period of almost 40 years, told us that she had been sexually assaulted by our family physician when she was 16. She was afraid to tell anyone, at that time, because she thought she would not be believed. Ironically, this was the same man who delivered one of my sisters’ children, and we had implicit faith in him. Of course, that would have added to this relative’s reluctance to reveal anything.

Subsequently, the physician met with a horrific end. Men broke into his medical office, seeking drugs, and beat him so that he lost his vision, and a few years later, he died. We know from research, specifically on pedophiles, that persons with strong ties to families are the ones who are most likely to offend against that family.

For treatment of a spider bite behind her knee, a woman visited a family friend, Dr. Esmail Nadjmabadi. Under the guise of a colon cancer test, he sexually assaulted her in his exam room.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Nadjmabadi is included in a group of ten California doctors who regained their licenses after being suspended for sexual misconduct.

An analysis of board data conducted by the Times revealed that out of all doctors whose licenses were revoked for any other reason, the state Medical Board reinstated the licenses of almost 50% of sex offenders who applied for them.

How many investigators do medical boards employ, or do they employ any at all? We have a duty to protect healthcare professionals and patients from harm, including sexual harm. In the case of college-based medical care, we also see instances of sexual abuse by these professionals, and the schools are usually reluctant to have student victims take the case off campus to the local police.

University Clinics’ Involvement

In my wish to be fully informed, I once asked, a man who was responsible for student campus safety what he did when a woman student complained of unwanted sexual behavior by other students. “We move the man to another housing unit on campus,” he said, believing that solved the issue altogether. The police were never involved.

The case of Tatiana Tarasoff highlights the reluctance to involve law enforcement on campus. A student in therapy with a university-employed psychologist related his homicidal fantasies regarding Ms. Tarasoff. The psychologist and his mentor decided that only the campus police needed to know and the matter was not addressed with local authorities. Subsequently, upon returning to campus from a brief vacation, the woman was murdered, and the student pleaded mental impairment and left the country.

At one time, I had the opportunity to teach during the summer at a major university, and staff brought the issue of on-campus rape to my attention. I do not know if the parents who were bringing their daughters for campus tours were ever told about this, but it would seem they should have been informed.

The only notice that there was a problem was a flyer posted in some buildings stating that young women could request escorts back to their dormitories in the evening. While there, I recall that a young woman riding a bike on campus went missing.

I have to wonder if there were any complaints of untoward sexual behavior in the medical clinic on the grounds. Of course, I have nothing to base this on. I am merely asking the question.

Mental Health Professionals Abuse, Too

Medical professionals not only engage in sexual abuse of patients in physical exam situations but also mental health situations. A peer once told me about a psychiatrist who required women to strip to the waist for breast examinations during family therapy evaluations.

Anyone who knows anything about mental health knows that the mammaries are not involved in these kinds of evaluations. The resolution? After this staff found out about his actions, management permitted him to take a vacation and transfer to a clinic in another state where he probably practices. Did anyone check up on his prior employment?

A distressed student once told me that her boyfriend confided in her that his female psychologist was having sexual intercourse with him at every session. This act was unethical, and someone should have brought charges against her. His mother, a psychologist, referred him to this woman, obviously not knowing of her disregard for patients in service of her own pleasures.

In another instance, I learned years ago about a psychologist who was taking young male patients home from a psychiatric hospital for the weekend. Allegedly, this was a treat for their good behavior during the week, but his wife did not see it that way. The chief of psychology at the hospital dismissed her as a deranged woman with mental health problems when she complained. The woman had no history of mental health issues.

As far as I know, nobody investigated this alleged activity, and the chief sided with the psychologist against these allegations. Eventually, the psychologist left the hospital, and I found out he was having an affair with a priest. He and his wife did divorce.

How Can Patients Be Protected?

By implementing simple guidelines, the institutions we trust with our lives and health may not put an end to the trend of allowing patients to be sexually abused, but it can somewhat stifle criminal acts. Specifically, healthcare offices and systems should require one or two healthcare providers in the room during sensitive assessments.

All medical personnel must be obliged to complete extensive training programs regarding proper boundaries and patient rights before engaging in delicate examinations. They must also educate patients about proper boundaries and procedures before conducting sensitive exams.

All employment applications need to receive adequate verification and letters of recommendation from reliable sources. A person’s high profile cannot be viewed as a reason to dismiss this careful review.

Institutions that receive reports of abuse must act quickly to stop the abuse and investigate to determine exactly what happened. Creating strong reporting and discipline procedures might also motivate coworkers to report any wrongdoing. Patients should also report allegations of sexual abuse by medical personnel to the police.

Situations of a one up, one down, as in the case of medical care, are highly attractive for individuals with nefarious intentions. They must be thwarted and routed out before they can do any more damage to patients. Each of us should care for our “neighbors.” If we care for each other, then we provide the necessary protection against those who would care less.

The post Patient’s Medical Trust Shredded by Those Who Took the Oath appeared first on Medika Life.

AI video monitoring systems offer hospitals a powerful tool to observe patients constantly, even when a staff member is not in the room. The AI watches the video, extracts movement patterns, and can identify key actions to understand trends and moments. Then, by creating workflows using this information, hospitals can improve what they know about their patients, reduce staff pressure on what happened when they were not in the room and enhance overall efficiency.

By continuously monitoring patients, these systems can become a trusted part of the bedside team – reducing clinician anxiety from the unknown of what is happening with one patient while occupied with others.

Observe, Recognize and Act: The Power of Human + AI in Patient Safety

Upon examining ECRI’s safety concerns, three core themes emerge timely intervention, adequate clinical support, and efficient care coordination. The absence of these aspects can compromise patient safety, leading to inadequate care and potential harm. In this respect, AI has a crucial role to play by aiding healthcare providers in time-critical decision-making. This kind of AI, augmented by virtual providers to support the bedside team, can improve efficiency and serve as a guardian angel for patients and their teams.

Combating Violence Against Healthcare Staff

AI’s ability to instantly identify aggression towards healthcare staff via video monitoring and predictive analysis can mitigate and diffuse potential safety issues before they escalate. In addition, by tracking how a patient is moving over time and changes in their patterns, video monitoring can help identify patients whose risk levels have risen. Combined with low-cost, ubiquitous video, providers can check in virtually anytime –  providing quicker responses to patients and reducing the potential for hazardous interactions.

Virtual Provider as the Guardian Angel of the Bedside Team

Often, clinicians are thrust into work beyond their competencies or scope of practice –  a situation that leads to professional burnout and dissatisfaction. This is particularly acute with nursing shortages that have led to less experienced nurses being put into more difficult situations than previous generations.

A virtual nursing system powered by AI could provide much-needed assistance, especially when nurses have to adapt to different unit requirements. A virtual nurse can offer real-time assistance regarding medication information or mentoring for specific procedures or other unit-specific details. By empowering the virtual nurse with AI that watches all patients, a more experienced virtual nurse can be directed to patients facing more precarious situations – like a static patient in bed who has not had a care in the last two hours (increasing their risk for pressure injury).

Also, virtual nurses can act as a secondary verification mechanism, reducing the possibility of medication errors directly related to three of the top ten safety concerns.

Optimizing Care Coordination

Gaps in care coordination for patients with complex medical conditions can have serious consequences. The attention to detail needed typically guides such patients to ICU settings. However, it is becoming more common that patients in step-down units have similar characteristics but with a fraction of the attention.

Continuous AI video monitoring can track a patient’s movement, location, care activity and related trends, making it more straightforward to monitor patients transitioning from higher acuity settings more closely virtually. This enhanced monitoring, paired with simplified virtual consultations, creates better care coordination between the teams where the patient is and where they came from. Similarly, it helps to ensure that critical care is not omitted from the patient’s journey.

Conclusion

Navigating patient safety concerns in today’s healthcare landscape is a daunting task. But with the integration of AI and human expertise, we can confidently address these challenges. AI not only enhances patient safety and care quality, but it also alleviates the burden on healthcare staff, improving their work lives. As the healthcare industry evolves, adopting AI will be instrumental in overcoming patient safety challenges and achieving optimal care outcomes.

The post Look Deep! Pressure and Risk in the Health Setting appeared first on Medika Life.

Essentially, you have two choices, weighing the risks of the vaccine against your healthy child’s risk from contracting Covid or, in the second instance, balancing the vaccine risk against any pre-existing conditions your child may have that would make contracting Covid dangerous.

I’m not anti-vaccine, just to get that out the way. Lara’s had all her other shots and I am a firm believer in time-proven vaccines, like the polio and measles vaccine. Actual vaccines that prevent infection and control or eliminate disease. We all know by now that this description does not apply to the Covid “vaccines”. We aren’t dealing with actual vaccines when it comes to Covid and the risks of “vaccination”, based on fact, may far outweigh the benefits. Especially when it comes to mRNA technology.

This is a lengthy article, but if you’re here, I assume it’s out of concern for your child and wanting to establish risk, benefit and fact before you take the leap. This article will provide this, along with a basic overview of the technology involved in the vaccines.

Is mRNA dangerous?

Unproven medicines carry risk, particularly in the long term. It is one of the main reasons medicines can take five to eight years or in many instances even longer, to reach the marketplace, or rather patients. Side effects that are immediate are often picked up in clinical trials, but other side effects can take years to manifest. In the case of mRNA it becomes even more complex. As we are dealing with gene-based medicines, in the case of mRNA, side effects may only become evident in your offspring.

It’s a whole new ball game and one we’ve been working toward for the last decade. Make no mistake, mRNA medicines offer the promise of targeted individual treatment that could eradicate diseases like cancers. They are exciting and potentially life-saving. They are the future of medicine and we may have just seriously diminished their long-term credibility in the market place in one foul swoop, in an ill-conceived effort to medicate the entire planet against Covid.

Until the pandemic, mRNA treatments were restricted to end of life patients. Why? Well, we working tirelessly to better understand the risks involved in the technology and these treatments were only approved for people that had no other choice to prolong their lives. Impending death voids risk.

Then came Covid, and along with it, the need to make people feel safe and reboot our social connections and economies. Governments, perhaps in desperation, seized on the rapidly developed mRNA treatments, incorrectly labelled them as vaccines (instead of immunizations), and in doing so created a public perception. Get the shot and you’re safe. Why wouldn’t you be, that’s what vaccines do. In truth though, and as the public has discovered in recent months, these mRNA treatments were not vaccines. They do not prevent infection, transmission or the Covid disease.

The hurried Covid clinical trials were filled with flaws (more on this further into the article), both from the companies contracted to run the trials and in the reporting of the results. This article isn’t about allocating blame however, it is simply about sharing information, facts and the simple realities are that the original Covid mRNA clinical trials for adults were themselves flawed. Then came the trials for children.

What your child and mice have in common.

Easily answered. Pretty much nothing, aside from an established pattern of using mice in trials to establish human compatibility, and if you’re wondering why this question, it is because the approval by the FDA for vaccinating your child with mRNA technology was based on trials conducted on mice. Yup, you heard right. Mice, and to add insult to injury, only a few mice. Worth mentioning at this point, that success in mice doesn’t always translate into a viable product in humans.

Mice are commonly used in what we call “surrogate trials” and the easiest way to understand this is with an example one of my colleagues recently brought up, that of statins, a group of drugs used to lower your cholesterol levels. Statins were rigorously trialed over a long period of time and overcame numerous hurdles to become one of the best tolerated and safest drugs doctors have at their disposal. New companies soon added their own versions of these drugs, and, as we already knew by this stage how well tolerated the drugs were, these companies were allowed to use mice in so called surrogate trials, where the unfortunate, unpaid rodents got to stand in for human subjects.

No harm, no foul, simply science using hard won and long established protocols for safely testing a drug. Up until the pandemic, mRNA had been subject to the same safety protocols.

mRNA drugs may not be well tolerated and may not be safe to use. The truth is we simply don’t know enough yet of their long term effects and can only pray that the world’s largest clinical trial (read the Covid vaccination drive) proves them safe in the long term. We may have to wait a generation to establish their real impact on patients. This is a simple scientific fact. No long term safety data exists for mRNA medicines.

Establishing your child’s risk from SARS-COV2

If you’re a responsible parent, you’ve probably had your child immunized and vaccinated against a host of serious diseases. We do this to protect our children. For instance, young males contracting Mumps can, as a side effect of the disease, end up sterile. Measles, polio and many other childhood diseases can be potentially fatal and debilitating. The question you should be asking then, is how does Covid affect young children?

In the case of certain conditions that leave your child immune compromised, diabetes, heart disease, obesity and certain other conditions I will list at the end of the article, getting your child vaccinated against Covid makes sense. The risk of serious adverse events (SAE’s) from the vaccines are mitigated by your child’s likelihood to develop serious Covid. In other words, Covid poses more of a threat to your child than the mRNA vaccines. You must address risk-risk alongside risk-benefit.

“42 studies containing 275,661 children without comorbidities and 9,353 children with comorbidities were included. Severe COVID-19 was present in 5.1% of children with comorbidities, and in 0.2% without comorbidities”

Tsankov BK, Allaire JM, Irvine MA, Lopez AA, Sauvé LJ, Vallance BA, Jacobson K. Severe COVID-19 Infection and Pediatric Comorbidities: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Int J Infect Dis. 2021 Feb;103:246-256. doi: 10.1016/j.ijid.2020.11.163. Epub 2020 Nov 20. PMID: 33227520; PMCID: PMC7679116.

One of the conclusions drawn in the above study (linked in footer) was that it was impossible from the data to identify which comorbidities in children led to more serious Covid, but one stood out in the data, namely obesity.

It’s important to recognize that your child may also be suffering from an as-yet undiagnosed condition that would make them more susceptible to serious Covid. While other non-mRNA vaccines address Covid, none of these have yet achieved regulatory approval for use in children under 12 (see list in footer).

If you are however the lucky owner of a healthy hobbit, then you can with a high degree of confidence, assume your child will simply shrug off the Covid virus with minimal side effects. It would appear that Covid, particularly the current strains, to which children seem to be more susceptible (although this may simply be the effect of reopening schools, a know driver for influenza) does not prove deadly to young healthy adults or children. Only in extremely rare instances do healthy children develop serious Covid.

In short, Covid poses a very, very low health risk to healthy children of all ages. The same can not currently be said for the mRNA vaccines with a slew of widely reported, serious side effects, including heart-related damage. While there may as yet be some unfathomable reason for the vaccines not being linked to these reports (a scenario which seems less and less likely as time progresses), the onus of proving the vaccines are not at fault lies with the pharma companies. In this authors opinion they are too heavily invested in the products to address these concerns, so revert to lobbying to ensure the vaccines continued use.

Natural Immunity versus the mRNA shots

This is a non-starter right from the outset. It’s a little like pitting an elephant against a mouse in a tug of war. Naturally acquired immunity always trumps artificially prompted immunity, but this isn’t even really a discussion we should be having. mRNA treatments do not invoke immunity in the patient as they aren’t vaccines. You can still be infected, so you expose your child’s body to two sets of challenges by opting for the vaccine.

• In the first instance your child’s body must deal with the artificially introduced spike protein in the mRNA shot. This spike protein rapidly spreads throughout the patient’s body, embedding itself in all their organs, including the heart and brain, eliciting in some cases, a massive immune response. It is, what many suspect, leads to the SAE’s.
• Your child will still contract Covid at a later date, prompting another immune response and placing more stress on their tiny systems.

Worth mentioning here is that your child may very well already have been infected by the SARS-COV2 virus and simply shrugged it off, or only felt out of sorts for a few days. We do not test for prior infection before vaccinating a child or adult, suggesting that “wholesale vaccination” rather than individual treatment and the best interests of the patient drove the pandemic vaccination strategy. Natural acquired immunity was completely ignored.

ALWAYS test your child for Covid prior to opting for the vaccine, as administering the mRNA vaccines on top of an active Covid infection can be debilitating for the patient. This strategy is also recommended for adults.

Establishing real risk for mRNA Vaccines in children

As I mentioned earlier, the rushed clinical trials were about as far away from normal pharma and FDA protocols as you can get while still having your treatment approved, and then some. With the pandemic in full flow, we waived all sorts of standard safety protocols, including the usual “wait and see” phase which can run into years for most medicines. We are still unable to predict Covid risk accurately but Table 1 below sets out to do that based on data collected across the United Kingdom. This data is based on deaths prior to the vaccines being released.

You can see in the first line that prior to the vaccine roll out, the survival rate in children was 99.9973%. Knowing this, the decision to use an improperly trialed new technology with as yet, undetermined long term side effects and a known list of SAE’s that stretches into pages, was nothing short of criminal. The scientific community and governments rubber stamped mass vaccination knowing full well that their justification (looking out for others) lacked substance. mRNA vaccines did not reduce transmission, infection or the disease itself, only providing middling protection against death.

Now, the same institutions are advising you vaccinate your child. Below, a few more facts about the mRNA trials.

• The mRNA vaccines were never tested on nursing mothers, yet nursing mothers were advised by everyone that the vaccine was safe for them to use. Nursing mothers usually make up an integral part of new drug trials.

• The original trial revealed that a person was 95% ‘less likely’ to catch the autumn 2020 variant of COVID-19. This is known in medical speak as relative risk reduction, but to know the true value of any treatment one needs to understand for that person, by how much is their individual risk reduced by the vaccine – that is, the absolute individual risk reduction.

This is a very important point, as we base risk assessments on the real world efficacy of a product and this point is explained in stunning clarity by a recent article in the Journal of Insulin Resistance titled Curing the pandemic of misinformation on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines through real evidence-based medicine, ISSN: (Online) 2519-7533, (Print) 2412-2785. I’ve extracted the relevant part below to further explain the point of absolute individual risk reduction. It matters in adults, but 10 times more so in the case of healthy children.

Importantly, it turns out that the trial results suggest that the vaccine was only preventing a person from having a symptomatic positive test, and the absolute risk reduction for this was 0.84% (0.88% reduced to 0.04%). In other words, if 10000 people had been vaccinated and 10000 had not, for every 10000 people vaccinated in trial 4 would have tested positive with symptoms compared to 88 who were unvaccinated. Even in the unvaccinated group, 9912 of the 10000 (over 99%) would not have tested positive during the trial period. Another way of expressing this is that you would need to vaccinate 119 people to prevent one such symptomatic positive test (assumed to be indicative of an infection, which, in itself, is potentially misleading but beyond the scope of this article).

This absolute risk reduction figure (0.84%) is extremely important for doctors and patients to know but how many of them were told this when they received the shot? Transparent communication of risk and benefit of any intervention is a core principle of ethical evidence-based medical practice and informed consent.

Clearly, these facts dramatically impact the risk profile of these medicines. For healthy adults and children, the risk of developing serious Covid is outweighed by the risk of SAE’s for the vaccine. It’s a simple case of diminishing returns in terms of actual benefit to the patient and the vaccine is found wanting. The diminished benefits to healthy patients are outweighed by the vaccine’s SAE’s, known or otherwise. Table 2 below lays out very clearly how many people required a vaccine per age group to prevent a single death.

For those who are math orientated, the quoted article’s author lays out the methodology to arrive at your absolute risk reduction from the vaccine for an adult aged 44.

If there is a 1 in 119 chance the vaccine protects you from getting symptomatic infection from ancestral variants, then to find the protection against death, this figure (n = 119) must be multiplied by the number of infections that lead to a single death for each age group. This would give (for up to two months after the inoculation) the absolute risk reduction (for death) from the vaccine. For example, if my risk at age 44 from dying from Delta (should I get infected with it) is 1 in 3000, then the absolute risk reduction from the vaccine protecting me from death is 1 over 3000 multiplied by 119, that is, 1 per 357000.

• Trial participants were limited to the type of adverse event they could report on their digital apps, and some participants who were hospitalized after inoculation were withdrawn from the trial and not reported in the final results.
• After two months into the pivotal trials, the FDA allowed vaccine companies to offer the vaccine to subjects in the placebo group, essentially torpedoing any chance of properly recording adverse events from that point on, forcing a reliance of pharmacovigilance data.
• Trials in children did not show a reduction in symptomatic infections but instead used the surrogate measure of antibody levels in the blood to define efficacy, even though the relationship between Wuhan-spike vaccine-induced antibody levels and protection from infection is tenuous, at best. The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDAs) own website states that: Results from currently authorized SARS-COV-2 antibody tests should not be used to evaluate a person’s level of immunity or protection from COVID-19 at any time, and especially after the person received a COVID-19 vaccination.
• SAE’s reports are numerous and sadly appear far more common place than the governments and pharma suggest. In some instances, the mRNA vaccines are potentially harmful.

The general public associated a reduction in deaths with the original mRNA Covid trial. This was however not the case and in fact, no such data was presented, only interpreted as such by governments and health authorities, the scientific community and the media, placing a positive spin on the results. Again, from the article in the Journal of Insulin Resistance quoted above.

“Contrary to popular belief, what the trial did not show was any statistically significant reduction in serious illness or COVID-19 mortality from the vaccine over the 6-month period of the trial, but the actual numbers of deaths (attributed to COVID-19) are still important to note. There were only two deaths from COVID-19 in the placebo group and one death from COVID-19 in the vaccine group. Looking at all-cause mortality over a longer period, there were actually slightly more deaths in the vaccine group (19 deaths) than in the placebo group (17 deaths).”

Sadly, most websites still misreport the efficacy of the vaccines and vaccine related articles are often riddled with inaccuracies, even sites like Yale Medicine, which in a recently updated article (Oct 2022) continues to enforce the misconception of how effective the vaccines are. The quote below is taken directly from the article and is indicative of how scientific institutions continue to spread the pandemic vaccine narrative, confusing the public and essentially misleading them. The article also downplays the associated risks of the Covid vaccines.

“When Pfizer-BioNTech applied for FDA authorization for its vaccine in December 2020, its initial Phase 3 clinical data surpassed expectations with 95% efficacy, based on an independent analysis by the FDA.”

Kathy Kattela

A few parting thoughts

I have, for the last two years, spoken out strongly against the practice of enforcing Emergency Use medications on the public, through mandates or by coercion. Unfortunately, we set off down this path, restricting our children’s access to education based on their vaccine status. Now we are trying to coerce millions of parents across the globe to continue accepting the risk posed by mRNA shots and expose their children to potentially life threatening side effects, when the disease itself poses a very, very limited risk to healthy children.

No one should have the right to enforce potentially life threatening treatments on your child unless the end result is justified and they have made a risk based case for the use of the treatment. I have shown you how they have failed to do this and how, in reality, you have been misled over the duration of the pandemic about the efficacy and risks of the mRNA vaccines. Everything you’ve read above is fact and can be easily and readily verified.

As a parent I even advised my older adult children to avoid the mRNA vaccines and they all opted for the more traditional vaccines offered by the likes of Johnson & Johnson, where known SAE’s were all they had to contend with, rather than roll the dice on an untested genetic treatment employing a novel method of delivery.

I hope the article has been informative and that it in some small way helps you find peace as a parent concerned for the long term and immediate health of your child. Remember, the choice of vaccinating your child against Covid is yours.

Further Information

Covid treatments approved for children

• Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine for children ages 6 months through 4 years
• Moderna mRNA vaccine for children ages 6 months through 5 years
• Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5 through 9 years
• Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 6 through 11
• Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, now called Comirnaty, for people age 12 through 17
• Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 12 through 17
• Novavax non-mRNA COVID-19 vaccine for people age 12 and older

Conditions in children that may increase the risk of serious Covid

• Obesity
• Cancers
• Conditions that affect the child’s immune response
• Diabetes
• Heart Disease
• Chronic Lung Disease other than Asthma
• Seizure Disorders

Further reading

European Medicines Agency: Assessment Report, Covid19 Vaccine Moderna

National Library of Medicine: Severe COVID-19 Infection and Pediatric Comorbidities: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

The post Should I Vaccinate my Child Against Covid? appeared first on Medika Life.

That is the PG-rated gist of how a middle-of-the-night phone call from a patient’s family ended, and it left me cold. The family member called about a patient admitted to me who was also serving a life sentence at the state prison. As one of the guards who accompanied the patient whispered to me conspiratorially, “I’m not supposed to tell you what he did, but it was bad,” he paused to look me in the eye. “Real bad,” he said with more depth of feeling than I thought those two words could support. “Now he is in for life, so he doesn’t have anything to lose. Know what I mean?” What he lacked in subtlety, he made up for in sincerity. So, yes, I knew what he meant.

So that middle-of-the-night phone call left me shaken, real shaken. Heart racing, pulse throbbing in my ears, tightness in my chest, muscles shivering scared. I tried to convince myself that I was safe and overreacting. I told myself the man on the phone couldn’t possibly know where I lived. After all, my phone number and address were unlisted in the phonebook. But then again, if my phone number wasn’t listed, how did he call me? My attempts to reassure myself and failed miserably.

I made a circuit of the house. I avoided the windows like a character in a spy movie, and I checked that all the doors were locked. I closed the blinds and then rechecked the doors. Then I peeked out through the slot in the curtains.

“Was that car parked on the street there earlier?”

“Is that shadow in the back yard a shrub? Has it always been there?”

I cursed myself for not paying more attention to my environment before this moment, especially now that it could mean the difference between life and death.

I relived the details of the phone call. The caller was irate, that was clear. From there, the one-sided conversation got murky. Reassembling his random, incoherent complaints was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle when the pieces seem to be from more than one set. I’m pretty sure the man on the phone said the patient was his bother. From what I managed to piece together, the caller accused me of conducting experiments on his brother and other inmates and even killing them. He charged me with being the reincarnation of Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi Angel of Death, who conducted medical experiments on prisoners in the death camps during World War Two. Not that he ever mentioned Mengele’s name. I doubt the caller knew who Mengele was as the man on the phone did not appear to be burdened by an overabundance of education. What he was burdened by was an overabundance of intoxicating substances. His rant slurred around to the same points so often that even someone with OCD would find it tiresome. The one thing no one would have diagnosed him with was eloquence. His speech stuck with small words, mostly just four letters long. He made up for his lack of verbal breadth by recombining those few words in equally creative and nonsensical ways. If cursing is an art form, then this man is the Salvador Dali of profanity.

Nonetheless, he had used his vast and poorly defined investigative skills to uncover my nefarious plot of torture and murder in the “name of science.” Now that the truth was revealed, he was on a crusade to foil my wicked scheme by well, torturing and murdering me. Logic appears to have taken one look at this conversation and developed such an intense migraine that it went to Aruba to recover for the rest of the week.

He didn’t conclude his circular logic so much as he wore himself out from turning it over so many times. That was when he issued his threat and hung up.

Alone in the dark with my sleeping wife just one room away, my anxiety did not abate, so I did something I had told myself I would never do. I have always been conscientious about my firearms. I know from experience that the gun most likely to hurt you or someone in your house is your own, so I keep my guns out of sight and out of reach. I even keep the ammunition locked away in a separate room. But that night, I violated my rule and loaded five rounds into the pump-action magazine, and those rounds were not birdshot. Then I hid the gun in the back of my bedroom closet.

Unfortunately, that brought me less reassurance than I had hoped, and no sleep came the rest of the night. Instead, I laid there, hyper-attuned to every little sound, both real and imagined. Things always seem less scary in the morning, but when the sun rose, I was still shaken. I pulled one of the penitentiary guards aside at the hospital and told him what had happened.

“You didn’t call them from your personal phone, did you?” he asked like I had just told him I put diesel fuel in my gasoline-powered car.

When inmates from the correctional system enter the hospital, no information is supposed to be given to the family before the prisoners return to the prison. This policy is to prevent impromptu family reunions and breakout attempts. But convicted felons and their families also have fundamental human rights that we must respect. So I had been asked to call one member of the family and explain the medical issues to them. Before making that call, a prison official carefully coached me not to give away any identifying information like my name, the name of the hospital or community, or any details of dates and times. The official did not tell me not to make this call from my personal phone.

“Oh ya, rookie mistake,” the guard said with a shake of his head at my idiocy. At that time, Caller ID wasn’t a standard feature with phones, but an extra you had to pay more to use. I didn’t have caller ID on my phone, but as the officer so sensitively put it, “every dirtball in the country has caller ID.” Then he continued, “well, I wouldn’t worry, usually nothing comes of it.”

“Usually nothing,” proved to be a phrase offering less comfort than I would have liked. It’s like explaining the statistical safety of air travel to someone in a crashing plane. I was well aware that just because most people would be ok in a situation like this did not guarantee I would be.

Despite my sleepless nights, the patient recovered from his emergency surgery without incident and returned to the correctional center infirmary a few days later. I blocked the phone number the angry call had come from, and nothing more ever came of it. But the loaded shotgun sat in my closet for weeks after the event, and my hyper-vigilant attention to any changes in my surrounding persisted as well. I would be startled awake by random noises and lay in bed with a racing heart for some time until I finally was able to get past the event. Time does heal, and eventually, I unloaded the shotgun and put it away, but I did continue to double-check that I locked every door.

I never talked to anyone about this. I didn’t want to look weak or crazy. And that probably wasn’t a good way to handle it because I got a little weird about the phone. I no longer identified myself by name when I answered the phone, and I refused to talk to anyone who didn’t immediately identify themselves, and the purpose of their call, which it turns out is a surprising number of people. My new phone policy resulted in several awkward conversations and one colleague who became quite offended.

“Hello,” said my wife answering the bedside phone in the middle of the night.

“Is Dr. Black there?” said an unidentified male voice.

“May I ask who is calling?”

“I’m calling Dr. Black, is he there?”

“Who would like to know?”

“Is he there?”

“You can reach him on his cell.”

“Damn it, is he there or not!”

Click, buzz. . .

I don’t think it is ever wise for a woman home alone to admit that to an unidentified man on the phone, and given the circumstances, I’m going to stand behind my wife on that one.

The first time I learned about Doximity Dialer, I immediately recognized its benefit. I don’t want to sound like an advertisement for the website I am writing for, but I do use this feature to call my patients. It allows me to call them from my cellphone and display the phone number for my office on the Caller ID. Doing so keeps people from getting my number and then abusing it. If they call back the number on their phone, it goes to my office staff or the answering service. Dialer has proven helpful in dealing with the criminal element and keeping clingy patients from abusing their access to me at all hours of the day and night.

Another critical point is that I should not have admitted a patient like to a community hospital — how that happened is a different story that occurred at the intersection of corporate greed and political ineptitude. How he came to be in my care was not my fault, but it was my problem, and I lacked the experience to deal with the issues involved in caring for someone like this. Worse yet, despite agreeing to take these patients, the hospital lacked the resources to keep its personnel safe. This man proved to be just as dangerous as advertised. When I complained about this to the supervisor from the prison, he explained to me, “The guards only job it to keep the inmate from absconding, its not their job to protect the people who work in the hospital. That is your job.”

It may have been my job, but I lacked the experience, and the hospital lacked the resources needed to do the job right. We are lucky that no one was physically injured, although many were abused in other ways. For my failure to prevent that, I am sorry. As much as young doctors want to be all and do it all, we need to recognize our personal limits and the limits of the system we work. Exceeding those limits is dangerous, not just for the patients, but also for ourselves. There comes a time when you need to say no. It’s not easy and certainly not what we train to do, but sometimes it is the right thing to do.

And finally, whenever you call someone, tell them who you are and why you are calling. It’s just basic courtesy, and that courtesy is there to avoid misunderstandings and hurt feelings.

The post Sometimes You Need to Say No, for the Patient and Yourself appeared first on Medika Life.

All the usual suspects

To identify the root causes, and there are many, we need to examine the engines that power the industry, the healthcare behemoths. The corporate giants that have clawed their way to dominance, many amassing levels of wealth and influence on that journey that place them beyond the reach of even governments. They have become a law unto themselves, and they are without a doubt, what ails healthcare at its heart.

The extent of the wealth acquired by these corporations, their reach, and their influence has been brought home by the pandemic. What has become even more apparent is that the harmonious balance required for an effective relationship between the patient (the customer) and the company (in whatever form) has all but vanished. That relationship, so key to both the health of the industry and the patient, relies on two key elements to function — trust and ethics.

Both of which are absent in modern healthcare in 2022. The blame for the erosion of these elements can be laid squarely at the door of the behemoths. Patients are, for the most part, now viewed by industry as cash cows, rounded up for fattening and subsequent slow exsanguination over the course of their lives. Any loud complaints from the herd and the ranchers simply move the ranch house further from the pens. 

It’s a terrible picture to paint, isn’t it, and one many healthcare experts would deride as being a ridiculous representation of the industry. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In an article by NPR which hit the headlines in the last week, a baby powder produced by one of these companies contained carcinogenic asbestos, which, had unfortunately found its way into their powder during the production process. Sadly, by the time the product has been removed from shelves, consumers had been diagnosed with cancers. A class-action was brought against the company by the affected customers, seeking some form of redress or compensation. Faced with a choice of paying settlements, the company elected to pursue a legal loophole.

In a shuffle, known in legal circles as the Texas Two-Step, they registered a new company in Texas, shifted all onus for the product claims to the new division, and then filed for its bankruptcy, effectively killing off the hopes of any potential payments to their affected customers and ending the class action. As appalling as this is, it is an acceptable legal loophole which many companies use, in itself an indictment of the American legal system. The existence of the loophole, however, does not excuse the ethics of the companies prepared to engage it.

Profits are protected at any expense, with trust and ethics forgotten, and therein lies the problem. These companies aren’t selling us cars or cellphones. They are, in many instances selling us products that can cure our ills, extend our lives or potentially kill us, and in medicine, where that product ends up on that scale can often be a fine line.

So trust matters, hugely so. Breach it and you better have a damn good reason, supported by an ethical and transparent response to any harm you’ve caused. The fact that lawyers make a living off class actions aimed at these companies speaks volumes to the behemoth’s disregard for the customer and their wellbeing. Engage in legal shenanigans to avoid that responsibility and then offer me your Covid vaccine with the assurance it’s safe. 

The Power of the People 

If we then assume that much of what ails healthcare can be resolved by addressing and regulating the business practices of these corporate giants, that leads us to the title of this piece. Can these companies be “saved” or are they too far gone, despotic dictators obsessed with their own self-inflated worth who’ve lost the ear of their people? I tend to believe the latter.

The public is rediscovering their voice in terms of their health, determining outcomes, and engaging in the processes that surround their treatment. I use the term public and patient interchangeably, as any member of the public is, was, or will be a patient at some stage in their lives. We all require healthcare, no matter our status, race, or sex.

This patient-centric movement sweeping through healthcare is long overdue and has been birthed as a direct response to much of what I have described above. Taking that as a given, logic dictates that a popular movement that arises in response to a dictatorship will not endeavor to change the minds and hearts of its despotic rulers. Complete regime change is called for, and almost always results. You cannot fix something that is fundamentally broken and no longer fit for purpose. The behemoths have served their purpose and must be retired. For the sake of the patient and healthcare globally, we need to start afresh.

If we look to oust the current regime, how do we then harness this new force sweeping through the industry? How best do we use the momentum of the patient voice to engage lasting solutions?

At the risk of buying into trending catch phrases, decentralization of the industry is key. Redistributing the power amassed by the few among the many. Smaller, more focused companies that address specific needs, specialists in their chosen fields, offering tailored solutions to the real issues affecting the development and delivery of equitable and accessible health care. In short, a new model of care and delivery, built from the ground up with patients actively engaged as masons. And yes, ethical businesses that place their customers’ interests first and foremost can be profitable.

It isn’t simply the patients that stand to benefit from this change. Make no mistake, the egregious travesties visited on healthcare by these large corporations extend beyond the patient and has ensnared providers, who are in many ways, products and prisoners of the environment they are forced to function within. Patients looking around their lifeboat will find themselves surrounded by white coats.

I’d like to end this with a few probing questions, directed to the industry in its entirety. What happens when the next pandemic strikes, an event that is inescapable? How, at that point do we convince the global population that any potential treatment we’ve developed is in fact fit for purpose? How, when we currently engage in deceitful and dishonorable practices and place the acquisition of wealth before the interests of the very population we’re sworn to protect, do we reclaim our credibility? How do we rebuild and regain trust?

Now is the time to build afresh from the ground up, as many promising new start-ups are doing. We have the technology, the intellectual capital, and the desire. Time will show if we possess the will.

The post Are Healthcare’s Behemoths Destroying Healthcare? appeared first on Medika Life.

Together, they have earned an extra $10.7 billion over last year’s profits during (and largely because of) the pandemic — a stunning 56% increase. Despite this surge, we ranked Amazon and Walmart among the least generous of the 13 large retail and grocery companies studied in our report. The two companies could have quadrupled the extra COVID-19 compensation they gave to their workers through their last quarter and still earned more profit than last year.

Stock prices for Walmart have soared 36% since the start of the pandemic. Meanwhile, worker wages had grown only 6% by the end of 2020 even after last December’s bonuses were announced by the company. Walmart has (along with Amazon) redefined the term “corporate greed”, electing to drop sick and vulnerable employees along the way, viewing them as discarded lumps of diseased flesh not worthy of their billions. Damaged goods that can no longer serve their masters, through no fault of the employee.

If you think that description is a little harsh, it isn’t. It is reflective of a political mindset in America that rewards enslaving and exploiting the poor, often at the cost of their health. It is a mindset that persists independently of the color that occupies the White House, enshrined, entrenched capitalism at its worst. You cannot argue figures away and the graph above may as well be painted in the blood of the employees and families Walmart has destroyed in the last year.

According to figures from a recent study by Human Impact Partners, the extent of the impact of Walmart’s Sick Leave policy during the pandemic is this: at least 7,618 employee cases of COVID-19 and 133 deaths from COVID-19 could have been prevented. The effects on the broader public cannot be quantified. By forcing sick employees to return to work, Walmart has knowingly exposed its customers to potential infection from the coronavirus, contributing directly to the spread of the virus in the general population. It’s motivation? Unconscionable greed.

To make matters worse, intentional obstacles to accessing the paltry two days of paid sick leave make it even more difficult for sick Walmart staff to access the funds. Workers have reported barriers like retaliation and lack of communication around the policy in accessing even this meager amount of leave. According to a 2020 survey, 45% of Walmart associates reported they were still likely to come into work if they were sick. Employees reported fear of disciplinary action, loss of wages, and no knowledge of the 48-hour policy as reasons they would choose not to stay home while ill.

Offer your workers only TWO DAYS OF PAID SICK LEAVE and the following two scenarios unfold, pandemic or no pandemic. 

• Your employee is forced to return to work on the third day if they want to put food on the table for their families. If they’ve contracted a virus, this is the time they are at their most infectious, so Walmart is encouraging a policy that exposes the public to grave risk.
• Walmart turns off the pittance it drip-feeds its employees on day three of their illness if employers have even been able to access these funds in the first place. Staff who become seriously ill face a double whammy. Any potential savings, if they are fortunate, are quickly eroded by medical expenses, medication, and the related costs of illness, and their source of income is officially disconnected as per Walmart policy. No money, no food, no medicine. Tell me which part doesn’t upset you?

Add in the institutional obstacles to accessing these funds and staff are automatically coerced into staying at work, despite being ill. This promotes the spread of disease and places the life and health of the employee at risk.

Flawed Business or Flawed America

Take your pick, one or the other or both, the outcomes are the same. Current policies and permitted practices encourage racism, enforce poverty and deprive the poorest communities of the dignity of basic health and access to care. Ask yourself this.

Why is it that hard-working Americans are required to petition employees for BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS? BASIC HEALTH? BASIC DIGNITIES? Clearly, that little piece of paper referred to as a constitution appears to be fundamentally flawed and may require a redraft. The rights of all working Americans to the dignity of something as simple as paid sick leave, particularly at the time of a pandemic should be enshrined in law, vigorously enforced by legislation, and actively policed for transgressors. Fail to do this, to recognize basic human rights, and the subsequent costs of a failed system skyrocket. Particularly for healthcare.

Walmart isn’t just killing its staff and exposing the public to danger with its despicable profit-based policies, it’s contributing to the downfall of the American Healthcare system. Vote with your feet to register your outrage and do the right thing. Shop elsewhere until this greedy corporate entity decides to recognize its employees as human beings. 

Both Democrats and Republicans need to focus more on resolving basic inadequacies like these that affect large swathes of Americans. You cannot build new infrastructure on rotten foundations, President Biden, and your current building is teetering on the verge of collapse. You can read the full HIP report here: Walmart’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic: How lack of paid sick time prolongs the pandemic and increases mortality

The post Walmart’s Paid Sick Leave Policy is the Punchline to an Abusive Employer Joke appeared first on Medika Life.

Into this breach, have stepped the scammers. They are without morals and are concerned only with profiteering from the misery. If the fake medicines they sell you lead to your death, they couldn’t care. If they take your life savings to sell you a space in a hospital that doesn’t exist, they couldn’t care. They have your money and that is all that interests them. Indian newspapers are rife with stories of woe and horror, showcasing the darker side of humanity.

The IndianExpress has just published a story entitled, Covid-19 patient dies after getting fake remdesivir injections, culpable homicide charges have been invoked against the accused. An article in The Hindu highlights just how cybercrooks are stealing from the vulnerable. In a recent case, a person lost ₹40,000 to a cyber crook who asked for money to arrange an ICU bed at a private hospital and after taking the money in advance, switched off his phone. The article below, another death linked to black-market remdesivir.

How to Stay Safe

We are indebted to Sugandh Rakha for the following advice he is sharing on social media, via Twitter in an effort to support his thread and address these con-artists and keep victims safe, we’ve reprinted the content of the Twitter thread below for ease of access. You can unroll the entire thread here. This information is reprinted with his consent and we encourage readers to share this as broadly as possible. For the most part, Sugandh advocates common-sense steps and no matter how desperate you become, take a moment to verify details and ask friends for their advice.

Tips to avoid Remdesivir/Tocilizumab/Covid-19 scams:

• Do a Twitter search and Google search on the phone number and account number provided to you. Check if there are other people complaining about the fraud. Fraudsters will validate their own numbers, so watch out for scam alerts.
• Remdesivir needs to be kept between 2–8 Celsius at all times. Hence, even if you get the injection from the black market, it would have probably lost its efficacy due to incorrect maintenance of cold storage.
• If you have never spoken to the seller on phone or in person, that’s a red flag. Scammers tend to use WhatsApp messages/SMS only. This helps multiple people operate the same number. Business accounts are also very common. Insist on talking to them on phone (not WhatsApp call).
• Ask a trusted friend to cross verify. Tell him/her to pose as an independent buyer.
• Check this thread for known Scammers. If you find any scammers or black marketers add them to this thread.

Editors note: Facebook also provides a reverse search for telephone numbers. We recommend using it as another tool, simply enter the telephone number in the Facebook search box.

Things scammers/black-marketers commonly say:

1. “This is from a family of a patient that didn’t survive.”
2. “I will courier the injection to you.” Even if they do courier it, the product’s efficacy would probably have been lost because of the summer heat during the travel.

Here is the original thread, and you can expand this directly to Twitter if you’d like to contribute to the conversation or add scammer numbers, you could be saving a life. Medika Life will check this thread and add the numbers you contribute to this article, please be sure to include the area you live in.

India’s government has issued a notice that it has attached all legal supplies of remdesivir and tocilizumab. These are being channeled to hospitals and this is your safest option for securing medication. Speak directly to your nearest clinic or hospital. Here’s another Twitter thread on the announcement.

Stay safe and try and protect your loved ones by avoiding dangerous fake medications sold by online scammers. If it looks too good to be true, then it probably is and if you’ve fallen victim to a scammer, please share the experience. It will save others.

Please also keep in mind that almost all these medicines that are being sold need to be very carefully stored and transported to ensure they retain their effectiveness. Black market products, even if they are “legitimate” are almost always rendered useless because of failure to store or transport the medicines correctly. It is also a very simple operation to replace the contents of a vial with something else. You have no guarantee at all if you choose to buy from a scammer, no matter how convincing they sound.

The post Covid Patients in India Warned About Scammers Selling Fake Medicines and Cures appeared first on Medika Life.

Digital health is part of our lives and has become a part of “us,” and I respect your leadership to make patients’ lives better. Along with digital health, leaders of healthcare organizations make decisions to implement and use digital products in our work environments. The collaboration of both parties makes up today’s healthcare, hence open and transparent communication channels are crucial to a healthy ecosystem in healthcare. 

I have experienced almost every level of digital health integration in our industry and feel obliged, based on my experiences and the issues I have observed, to speak up. Being passionate about patient safety and empathy in healthcare, the frustrations and concerns raised by providers and colleagues, and the accompanying instances of patient harm are of deep concern to me. As I have worked in both inpatient and outpatient settings, here are direct quotes from people I have interacted with. 

Let me start from the inpatient setting: 

“I can’t get my medication from the Pyxis (medication dispensing machine)! It has been 2 hours past the schedule!” says one nurse, trying to give an insulin dose for high sugar to a patient. She couldn’t get her login figured out after her bioID or password did not work. 

“I spent 50 minutes just trying different workarounds!” says an infusion nurse trying to scan an IV bag to assemble with an antibiotic that will not scan because of a glare from the plastic wrap. There is no clear solution. 

“Can pharmacy come and help? I have a patient in surgery already!” says a surgery technician, frantically asking for anesthesia medication because she has an issue with a new login process for accessing Pyxis.

Is it an upgrade or a downgrade?

Whenever there is an upgrade for a health IT product or process we are using, these upgrades are accompanied by cries for help. It is an almost standard response accompanying the upgrade from staff trying their utmost to access medications for their patients. Even when there is no upgrade in progress, we continuously need to develop a process to get around the problems created by AI and IT. 

“I spent 2 hours talking directly to the support members of all the involved products, and none of them are willing to accept the onus of addressing issues created by their technology in the field. Nurses are calling nonstop, and orders are piling up.”, says a colleague.

“The message on the screen said to check the power cords and to try other things, then call if none of those would work. Do you know what the real problem was? It was the browser. The application would only work in Chrome! Why didn’t the message say it then? I wasted 2 hours troubleshooting an issue that I could have resolved within minutes. 

I did not see that sticky note.”, says another colleague.

Is the outpatient setting any better?

“I cannot make an appointment for a vaccination. There is no feature that allows me to enter my problem in the appointments portal! Why isn’t there an option to enter free text? There is no one answering the phone at the time I can make a call, so instead of being able to use this conveniently located vaccination center, I had to drive 100 miles to get the vaccine through a different pharmacy.”, says a friend.

“Thanks for covering my shift. Do you know what happened? I got to the appointment, and the receptionist said she couldn’t find me in the system. I had the confirmation number and everything. I am never going back there, and now I have to figure out everything all over again, time, work, family.”, says my coworker. 

“I went to all the pharmacies I used before, and none of them had my prescription ready! The doctor said it was sent to the pharmacy electronically, and his office was closed when I called to find out which pharmacy he’d used. Can you guess where I found it the next day? It was at the outpatient pharmacy at the clinic!” says a patient.

Many of these flawed digital options I’ve described above are forced on patients without their consent, choice, or support. When calling a medical office, patients get directed to go to the digital solutions offered by providers’ websites. 

For clinicians, we use various products, from checking products in crash carts for Code Blue to Epic for electronic medical records to record notes and communicate with various participants to care for patients. For patients, these records get accessed through Epic’s MyChart portal. When I attended South by Southwest (SXSW) in 2013 as a student startup attendee, speakers were already talking about a future where every patient would be wearing devices like the Apple Watch to measure health. That time has come. 

And digital has become pervasive throughout healthcare. Even when we visit websites, we encounter chatbots to guide us through our visit, guiding us, asking questions, and directing us when we search for information, such as for clinical trials. Patients and healthcare workers use these tools every day to make our lives more efficient and I applaud the passion and efforts to make healthcare better. 

However, what if things don’t go as intended? What is the plan?

When things don’t work out as intended, no one is accountable. Not for lost productivity, money lost and for patients who experience the negative impacts of poorly functioning solutions. Most importantly patient safety issues caused by digital health solutions are not addressed. Healthcare’s bottom line can be affected by how digital health products perform in a clinical setting like this example, allegedly resulting in the financial breakdown of the institution. If this institution was the only hospital in the area, imagine how detrimental the effects would have been to the local community.

When we get the explanation of “It is an IT issue.” in healthcare, we wait till someone in the IT department resolves it. However, as we use many different products, establishing which one is causing the issue takes time. Different vendors point to other products for faults. In the meantime, we have to work around the issue while it’s addressed, often making the situation worse. Identifying which vendor is to blame doesn’t always resolve the problem either. Sometimes flagged issues get lost somewhere in the communication process, and no one follows up. Sometimes vendors wait until enough people complain about an issue before they apply a patch or a fix. 

Here are 3 recommendations I would like to voice as a healthcare professional and a patient advocate: 

1. Your end-users are ultimately patients, no matter who uses your product. 

Whether your product line targets businesses, clinicians, or customers including patients, if your product is for healthcare, the ultimate end user of your product are the patients. Let’s say your product’s users are doctors and nurses, or even nonclinical professionals in healthcare who support the clinical professionals. Your product is ultimately helping the institutions that are treating patients. Even though your product’s direct users are not the patients, your product needs to be designed “for” patients’ safety. Please remember that when your product breaks down or does not work as intended, you are ultimately compromising patient care and safety; the time and resources saved by your product are no longer enabling the direct users, which negatively impacts their ability to properly assist their patients. 

2. Healthcare is not binary, and your digital solutions shouldn’t be either.

Chris Dancy, “the most connected man on Earth,” says it so well in his book, Don’t Unplug.

Healthcare is not binary. 

The digital solutions you provide should not be either when integrated into practice settings. I know it is easier when things are all categorized with a yes or no. Data and A.I. like 1’s and 0’s but healthcare is far more nuanced. Not everything is easily categorized into predetermined boxes, as many issues are interconnected to each other. Consider “other” and “comment” as an option at all times. Digital healthcare works most efficiently when combined with a human touch that allows for the complexity of our species, in my humble opinion. Consider connecting the services you provide digitally with a person who can help that process as not everything is clearly yes or no, especially on the patients’ end. 

3. Please look ahead and consider empathy for “patients” and provide solid feedback loops for the “users.”

Notice “patients” and “users” are different here. I am a strong believer in empathy being the essential ingredient for all healthcare problems. Digital health is no exception. Again, your products exist essentially to help patients in the end, even though the direct users may not be patients. Consider asking questions like, 

“Are we providing our support staff with a broad enough brief, of how our products can not only help but also harm patients when things don’t work out?”

“How are we advocating for patients even though our direct users are not patients?”

“Are we regularly assessing feedback loops? Do our users have ways to properly bring their concerns to our attention? What is the pattern of communication breakdown? Do we have ways to collect this data?”

“Are our staff properly trained in how to resolve problems users bring to their attention? Are we training their listening skills and developing their empathy?”

Users’ concerns should always be seriously considered and never ignored. Healthcare is very detail-oriented. Continuous improvement and quality enhancement are must-haves, again, for patient safety. This is the difference between products that suffer poor adoption in the market and those that become indispensable. Great products work with and for the users and are flexible enough to change to address fluid workplaces.

Patient safety is a serious issue in digital health that does not enjoy enough attention. Not enough is being done about the problems users encounter on a daily basis. While the explosion of digital health is openly welcomed in the deeply flawed health system in the US, serious consideration of how the integration of digital technology into clinical settings and real lives occasionally compromises patient safety, which lags far behind. The digital health phenomenon is no longer based on “optional adoption’; it is intentionally and forcefully pushed to all of us. 

Avishek Choudhury and his colleagues studied research in digital health in the geriatric population and also studied artificial intelligence solutions in healthcare for patient safety. Their research highlighted

• machine learning and AI lack standardization, 
• lack of customization to clinical settings, 
• and lack of appropriateness of data being used in provided solutions

The most concerning issue for me, identified in the papers, was the inability of many systems to consider patients with comorbidities appropriately. While digital health solutions may provide help for patients, there are still huge limitations because, as stated above, healthcare is not binary. Are we assessing patients’ preferences even before the interactions start? How much time are we spending to find more about what is involved beyond the scope of the limitations of the systems and narrowly defined categories? How much benefit do patients get from replacing people with digital health solutions?

Focusing on patients, being aware that healthcare solutions should not be binary but be integrated with a personal touch, and having empathy for patients and providing solid feedback loops are what I ask you to please consider. 

I’ll leave you with a parting story for your consideration, as I am active as a patient advocate for patients with language barriers. I attended a continuing education committee conference for doctors as a patient advocate. When I brought up my concerns for patients with language barriers to one of the speakers, he shared an “unfortunate” story of a Japanese patient with limited English who died of pneumonia while trying to communicate with a doctor using a patient portal. 

The patient’s request to speak to a doctor was routed through a digital portal, and the doctor was not able to clearly assess the patient’s condition before it got out of hand. While it can be argued the breakdown in communication here was not simply due to technology, we have to be aware of how we use digital health and ensure that patients and users who are not tech-savvy, ready, or willing to use it because of barriers, still have other ways to communicate. 

Should a case like this remain an “unfortunate” case? I respectfully disagree. The assumption that all patients and providers be able to communicate via the electronic portal and the assumption that all should be able to communicate in English, well enough to describe symptoms electronically, is fundamentally flawed. I have to disagree, as one in five of the US population speaks a different language at home, This is not a percentage that healthcare can ignore in favor of technology. 

Thank you for your time, and please have “patient safety” in mind at all times. Let’s not forget that it is a prerequisite for “being” in any type of healthcare, whether it is digital or personal. I humbly ask you to learn from patients and constantly improve the patient experience with empathy. Covid-19 should have been an awakening opportunity for patient safety as we all were on the verge of being a patient, more so than at any time in our lives. 

We must improve patient safety together, digitally and in person. 

The post Dear “Digital Health Leaders And Healthcare Leaders,” You May Be Inadvertently Hurting Patients appeared first on Medika Life.

My colleague and Medika co-founder Dr Jeff Livingston published an article yesterday morning that caught my eye. It’s about the Houston-based Methodist Hospital System and you can read the full article here. Essentially, here is the gist of the piece. The hospital’s Chief Executive Officer Dr. Marc Boom informed staff that they will now be required to be vaccinated. The new mandate will require all staff to receive their first vaccine dose by the middle of April.

They are the first hospital in the US to formalize this policy in writing, an important step that will be closely watched by other institutions, as this is in direct contravention to Federal Law and CDC guidelines, that state very clearly that experimental drugs — remember that none of the vaccines have finalized trials and only enjoy Emergency Use Authorization(EUA) approval with the FDA — may not be forced upon the public.

Individual rights and freedom of choice lie at the heart of this federal legislation. There is an unknown long-term element of risk (we have no idea if there will be any long-term adverse consequences to either of the two types of vaccine) in accepting the covid vaccine and the Federal government acknowledges and accepts this. As they don’t offer any form of compensation in the event things go wrong and have in fact indemnified drug makers against any claims relating to the covid-19 vaccines, it should only be considered fair that the choice to take the vaccine, be a personal one.

EUA MEDICINES CAN NOT BE MANDATED.

But it is happening, across the US, and various mechanisms are being employed to ensure you get your covid jab. Schools and universities will be at the forefront of the coming standoff. As early as September of 2020 articles were being published by NBC News, poorly researched and based on the flawed assumption that we’d be dealing with a normal vaccine and parents would have no legal foot to stand on. The truth is a very different beast.

Companies engaged in public-facing services are insisting, albeit less formally, that staff get vaccinated. Vaccine passports are on the verge of being released on an unsuspecting public and I’ve discussed the discriminatory mechanisms of these in-depth here.

Doctors tend to use the logic applied to mandatory vaccination for influenza and apply this to the covid vaccines. This is fundamentally flawed reasoning. We are not dealing with an influenza vaccine here, that has proven itself over decades and for which well-established risk profiles exist.

What are the facts?

• The covid vaccines, short term, have proven themselves both safe and very effective. FACT. There is however concern that they may not fare so well against variants and more data are required to answer this question definitively. You can validate existing reported data on adverse reactions recorded on the VAERS system via the CDC’s Wonder interface.
• We are dealing with a novel method of administration for two of the vaccines, mRNA is new and in a normally cautious medical environment, these products would have taken another four to five years to reach the market. FACT. We’ve rushed this, out of necessity. Another mRNA vaccine targeting Zika is in clinical trials. It will be interesting to see the timeline on this vaccine for final FDA approval.
• The SARS-CoV2 virus poses minimal risk to younger, healthy individuals with no co-morbidities. In fact, many older people who are otherwise healthy, also survive the virus. It poses a marginal, quantified risk unless you are obese and/or suffer from co-morbidities, a comprehensive list of which you can find here. FACT. The virus has already claimed over half a million lives in the US alone. There is clearly a risk, but it is a qualified one that we can now begin to statistically address.
• The covid vaccines we are offered are unapproved medicines. FACT. None have as yet completed trials (Long-duration Phase 3 findings). They all enjoy Emergency Use Authorization, which is not the same as a formally approved drug that has satisfied all the testing criteria.
• There is no existing data on the long-term efficacy and possible unforeseen side effects of an mRNA vaccine. FACT. While there may in fact, and we all hope this to be the case, be no side effects, we cannot exclude the possibility of negative unforeseen outcomes. It is an unquantified risk that will only be resolved over time and new research highlights our minimal understanding of the processes we are attempting to control.

The US government recognizes these facts and has passed legislation to protect its citizens accordingly. Sensible legislation, not influenced by pandemic paranoia, but a law that places the interests of the individual at the forefront. You can access the US legislation in full here and if you’re based in the EU. here’s the EU legislation passed to protect unvaccinated individuals against discrimination.

The Federal law is emphatic. Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) medications are not compulsory and your decision not to partake in vaccination, cannot be used to discriminate against you.

Dr. Amanda Cohn, the executive secretary of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, was asked if Covid-19 vaccination can be required, Her answer was emphatic.

“ under an EUA, “vaccines are not allowed to be mandatory. So, early in this vaccination phase, individuals will have to be consented and they won’t be able to be mandatory.” Cohn later affirmed that this prohibition on requiring the vaccinesapplies to organizations, including hospitals.”

What if companies, businesses, and hospitals persist?

The solution is a simple one. Accept liability for any potential future negative impacts the vaccines may have on the recipient’s health. One would assume from his policy that individuals like Dr. Marc Boom, from Houston Methodist, is completely convinced the covid vaccines are safe and will not produce any adverse reactions in the years to come?

If not, then he is knowingly subjecting an employee to a medication he is himself unsure of. Let’s clarify this even further. If the employee is in an established risk category, the argument becomes moot, as the benefit of taking the vaccine outweighs the risk. I am certain that the majority of Dr. Boom’s workforce is in fact healthy and not classified as being in a risk group for developing Covid.

Let’s see the employers put their money where their mouth is. If you are completely convinced the recipient will suffer no future ill effects from the vaccine, put it in writing. Accept liability. Except you won’t, will you? Not even the U.S. government is willing to go down this route. It is too fraught with risk and yet Dr. Brown seeks to remove the choice from his healthy employees, to roll the dice for them. What gives him the right?

Who gives any employer the right to ask this of their employees. It is offensive and completely at odds with medicines’ prime directive. To do no harm. If you are not 100% sure of the product and the disease poses negligible risk to the patient, can you in good faith proceed? What kind of medicine do you practice and what side of the fence are you on?

Time has just published an article suggesting people who won’t accept the vaccine now will be shamed into it later. Vaccine passports and schools will add to the pressure. All wrong, all hopelessly at odds with the law, and each process these institutions engage in, further distances people from the vaccines. The anti-vaccine brigade must be holding house parties celebrating your stupidity and arrogance.

The covid vaccine is a tool of health

It is not a political weapon to be wielded for commercial purposes, for political gain and to alter the global balance of power. It is a tool to combat the pandemic and to save lives. For those at risk, for the aged, for those who are obese, suffer from other risk factors, and struggle with immune disorders, this vaccine is a life-saving tool.

Despite this, it is still an unproven medicine, one not fully tested and one that cannot be enforced on any sector of the community. Getting the vaccine is a question of choice. It must remain this way. I look forward to your considered responses.

The post Enforcing Emergency Use Vaccines on an Unwilling Public. We Must Say NO appeared first on Medika Life.

Julie had been struggling for months to find a therapist to help her deal with increasing levels of anxiety. Finally, out of frustration and a desperate need for care, she settled on a therapist nearly five hundred miles away. Her sessions with the therapist, rather than being in person, would be virtual.

Julie is just one of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have discovered the benefits of telemedicine. The platform of video is perfectly suited to therapy. In fact one could argue that moving forward, mental health will become the natural home of telemedicine.

Patients can describe their full range of symptoms and the visual medium allows the therapist to evaluate their client more clearly. Perhaps more so than in a traditional setting as one-on-one calls are devoid of the distractions real-life settings offer. More importantly, distance no longer limits access to immediate care. Even country borders are no obstacle to the telehealth platform.

Telehealth, Telemedicine, or Virtual Health, take your pick, has been around for well over a decade. It never quite caught on and then, along came a virus. The rest is history. It’s now a catchphrase on the lips of every software developer, medical startup, and healthcare application developer across the globe.

The age of remote medicine has arrived.

But has it, really? Is the current infatuation merely driven by quarantines and the pandemic? When restrictions are lifted and we return to ‘normal’ will people once again prefer the option of ‘up close and personal’. For many aspects of medicine, there is no substitute for in-person consultations.

This is a discussion currently taking place in many medical circles, but one of the sectors that don’t look as though it will fall out of love with Telehealth any time soon is mental health. In fact, there are a growing number of applications hitting the market that target exactly this sector and it’s here that data issues are starting to raise eyebrows.

Commercializing Medicine

Get your consult and get your meds, all on the same platform. Spend a few minutes chatting to a qualified therapist or doctor and we’ll deliver your prescription the same day. It’s the promise of instant gratification and service. Sounds really good, but is it?

What we’re now seeing in the marketplace is concerning. A mostly unregulated prescribing machine to sell psychotropics and other regulated medicines. An automated conveyor belt that’s going to exacerbate America’s drug dependency at a rate hitherto impossible.

Telemedicine is, for many unscrupulous pharmacists, therapists and doctors, a digital pot of gold.

Telemedicine offers another massive windfall to companies that develop platforms. Patient data. This is where the real money lies and this is how the companies set about getting their hands on it.

The companies record your ‘private’ discussion with your doctor or therapist. Simple isn’t it. In fact, it is so simple and so easily done that most platforms openly admit to the practice. Here’s an example of a platform that is guilty of all the indiscretions listed here, Cerebral, a mental health platform to access telehealth. Their company structure is so obscure we were unable to find a contact person to approach for comment.

The next time you engage online with your therapist or doctor, remember you aren’t just speaking to that person, you may be addressing the entire internet. The normally hallowed medical sanctum of a consulting room with two people and an occasional dictaphone doesn’t exist in the digital world. Companies offering Telehealth platforms will tell you they’re recording your conversations in their terms and conditions and some will refer to obscure PHI and HIPAA statements. Some don’t even bother.

Your entire call is recorded and this information is stored for later analysis, either by A.I. which searches for keyphrases, or by human ears. Your deepest, darkest secrets, fears, and other conditions are now a part of the public domain and companies have now learned the value of patience. Responding immediately to farmed data creates a reference point that is fresh in the customer’s mind. Wait two weeks and memory won’t be recalled that easily or the associations made.

Medical data is one of the most sought-after commercial commodities. Think of the potential for monetization from your ‘private session’.

Huts told your therapist you feel like you’re being stalked? Suddenly you’re inundated with offers from security companies offering you home surveillance and more. Feeling a little suicidal? Suddenly your insurance premiums increase, you’re refused cover, and forget getting a bank loan. You may even be approached by organ donor companies.

Sounds far-fetched doesn’t it but you’ve only got to do one search on Google for a toaster and then let me know how many of the subsequent emails, advertisements, and other digital info that cross your path in the next few days refers to toasters or companies that sell microwaves.

Talk to a friend on Facebook about your toaster needs and the same thing happens. You don’t even need to type out the word. Algorithms scan your speech while you’re speaking and only saying the word will be enough to trigger the advertising. There are no ‘how weird is this’ coincidences in the digital world, just effective data harvesting.

Health is different though. Your Private Health Information (PHI) is considered sacred under the law and a lot is done by regulators to ensure it remains private. The reason is simple. Possession of this information by companies and non-medical entities can seriously prejudice you.

HIPAA was created exactly for this reason and I’ve written before on this topic. You can read more about this here. The problems HIPAA now faces are those highlighted in the linked article. No one could foresee the speed of development and deployment of digital technology. We’re playing catchup and some sectors haven’t even realized a game has been called.

As such, current patient privacy legislation looks more like Swiss cheese than a solid firewall to protect your privacy and data. Add to this the complication of non-medical companies now embedding themselves in the healthcare industry and you’re left with huge data privacy issues.

There is no clear solution to this issue for either the patient or the provider unless you’re able to bypass Telehealth platforms and communicate directly with your therapist or doctor via a platform like Skype or Xoom. Direct one on one communication that bypasses the data leeches.

It obviously isn’t a sustainable solution for the long term but does overcome privacy concerns and will offer both the patient and the therapist the benefit of privacy for their doctor-patient interaction.

Why is this happening

The short answer is that healthcare is ripe for exploitation by corporate and commercial ventures. There are vast sums of money to be made out of health, but simply providing a platform isn’t, on its own, lucrative enough to warrant the investments these companies require. The most effective means of monetization lies in harvesting data and onselling or using the data to generate internal sales.

Another ploy is to incorporate various services under a single umbrella, hence the association between telehealth and pharmacies. From a commercial standpoint, it’s a match made in heaven, and most pharmacies are only too eager to join in. Legislation and regulation don’t really exist yet to control these new entrants to the health sector and while the suns out, everyone is making hay.

Currently, the digital health sector is a wild west wonderland where fortunes can be made overnight and most of these are made at the patients’ expense.

What can therapists and doctors do?

As a responsible practitioner, you will know just how important PHI is. You’ll also know that the sanctity of the relationship you enjoy with a patient or client is integral to the practice of ethical medicine.

Not all Telehealth platforms are guilty of the practices described above and you can, with care and due diligence, identify ones that pose the least risk to both you and your patient. Platforms that don’t record conversations usually state this clearly and have very visible PHI and HIPAA statements on their websites. These are generally more trustworthy, but you still need to dig into the terms and conditions.

A mixture of services, particularly those seeking to simplify the prescribing of medicines, is a clear warning that commercial interests are at play.

What can patients do?

There really isn’t anywhere for you as a patient to go with this. Most platforms will ensure that they bury a clause in their terms and conditions that implies you’re fine with them recording your calls and that you agree to their subsequent use of your data for any reason they see fit,

No one ever reads these documents and you’re often not shown them. Simply downloading an app or opening a browser can also constitute your agreement to the terms of the platform. You’ve just given the company carte blanche to do whatever they like with your most personal and intimate data.

I mentioned earlier that healthcare data is sought after and nowhere is this more true than on the dark web. For this reason, many of the companies that record your calls are targeted by hackers.

Most data breaches are covered up and never disclosed. The smaller and more obscure companies with all their eggs in the app basket you’re using are particularly guilty of covering up data breaches. Their portfolios are not diverse enough to absorb the fall-off in customer confidence in their product and therefore disclosure is avoided.

The simplest thing to do is to follow the advice given above for now and try and engage directly on a person-to-person Skype or Xoom call. Companies will over time develop solutions to properly secure patient data, Medika itself is exploring a solution, but until these products become commonplace or enforced in the marketplace, can you afford to risk your identity and privacy.

The post What You Say on TeleHealth Doesn’t Stay on Telehealth. How Patient Data is Under Threat appeared first on Medika Life.