This Is Cheating. Plain & Simple.
Published by Vijay July 19th, 2009 in Ethics, Medical blogs, Medicine, Radiology…
via The Trial of a WhiteCoat – Part 14.
The radiologist that read the film had a habit of going to the surgeons the following day and asking them what they had found. He would open up a blank report so that it looked as if it was dictated at the time of the exam, but would then hold the reports as “preliminary” and finalize them after dictating in the results of the surgeries. That way it looked like he had picked up on all these small findings before anyone else knew about them. He was a decent radiologist, so no one seemed to mind that he was adding all these findings after the fact. Now it burned me.
I’m offended.
No.
That’s too light.
I’m pissed off as hell.
I believe the American’s call this kind of thing “Monday morning quarterbacking.”
Whatever you might call it, this is cheating in my book.
I don’t know why they let that radiologist get away with this kind of behaviour.
Moreover, I can’t believe that anyone would take the man’s reports seriously, leave alone the surgeons that he got information from. If by chance I was a surgeon in that hospital, I would intentionally throw him red herrings.
In case you haven’t been following Whitecoat’s account of his malpractice case, see previous posts of his epic saga here. Far better than reading any crime/legal thriller, cheap or otherwise. John Grisham could take lessons from Whitecoat.
I’m sure that radiologist was shady and was a key component to the real events, but I’d take at least half of what WhiteCoat writes with a grain of salt, if not outright suspicion. Too many of his stories–even before EPMonthly–were often *too* perfect, all the dialogue “just so”, and that’s exactly what one could expect from a good writer who at the same time needs to cover his tracks (as per HIPAA). One would think that writing in such an official forum now it would be less the case, but one never knows–perhaps the need is to be even more obscuring/fictional.
All I know is that I trust bloggers that steadfastly remain anonymous about as far as I can throw ‘em. Add that to a self-serving spectacle drawn out over 20 parts for maximum readership? Yes, John Grisham taking notes is about right.
Completely cheating.
Any addenda should be clearly marked as such; the preliminary report should stand and be dated with when it was dictated.
I cheated a litle recently; I was confronted with a film that looked like http://www.medicalfinals.co.uk/joomla/images/stories/medical_finals/lllpneumonia.jpg and was reported by the outside (private) radiologist as an moderate effusion and hiatus hernia. It wasn’t until after we spent an hour trying to mark the effusion with bedside ultrasound that I looked at the lateral and came to the correct diagnosis.
When I wrote up my notes, I mentioned the report, but didn’t mention that I didn’t look at the lateral until 2 hours later.