Battling Healthcare

I’ve owned my own business for many years. Before I began my work in patient advocacy and empowerment, I was a marketer, and advised dozens of businesses of all sizes (from individual professional services like lawyers and therapists to large corporations like GE and Kodak.) I get business, I understand development of income streams and I fully realize that profitability is always the goal among these businesses.

But I also know that profitability and business models are at the very heart at what is WRONG with healthcare. No matter what the problem with the system, its roots are grounded in the need to make money by someone.

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An article in my local newspaper makes me wake up and take notice of a real problem for women who, after breast cancer surgeries, wish to have their breast(s) reconstructed.

Mind you — we aren’t talking about breast enhancement surgery. No discussion of “boob jobs” here.

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If you follow the news at all, you’ve heard of MRSA, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus. It’s the superbug infection that mostly attacks people with compromised immune systems — the elderly, anyone with an autoimmune disease, someone who has just had surgery or has any form of open wound. The majority of MRSA is contracted in hospitals. In the past year or so, others have acquired MRSA and other superbugs in the community.

As a reminder, what makes a superbug is the bacteria’s ability to overcome any medicine developed to kill it. Methicillin was developed to kill difficult, hospital acquired strains of bacteria, and it was saving lives…. until the bugs it was killing figured out how to be stronger than the methicillin.

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Unlike the other work I do, this blog crosses the border, back and forth, between Canada and the US. You may not realize it, but our host, Hart and the HEN Network, is based in Canada. What I enjoy about my participation here is that it encourages me to think more globally than I typically do with my US-focused work. (thanks Hart!)

I explain all that today because news a few weeks ago about what the laws in Canada will allow, or not allow regarding the legal permission for Canadian doctors to apologize to patients for mistakes they have made, forced me to think of doctors and their apologies on a much broader basis.

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… you probably think they don’t affect you, because you only pick up your prescriptions at the local pharmacy, or get samples from your doctor….

But you would be wrong. Counterfeit drugs may be found in your own medicine cabinet — and you have no way of knowing they are counterfeit.

Surprised? I was too — and because I too often have to be so cynical in my work — I never should have been so surprised. Why? Because so much of healthcare is about money. And counterfeiting is all about money — making it for the perpetrators, and saving it for those who have to pay, whether that’s a pharmacy or a health insurer. And who’s money and lives is it costing? Ours, because we are the patients.

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It was revealed this week in documents released by Merck over the Vioxx debacle that we were all scammed — patients, doctors, stockholders and legitimate drug researchers.

If you aren’t familiar with the Merck and Vioxx scandal, let me bring you up to date.

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My friend Angela is in the middle of a debacle that probably should surprise no one, but is just as difficult and frustrating all the same.

Several years ago she had surgery. Not long afterwards, she had new symptoms that made her surgeon take pause… eventually it was discovered that the cause of the problem was a mesh fabric used as a part of the surgery. It wasn’t left there by mistake; it was part of the surgery. It was supposed to be there. It was manufactured to be left in someone’s body. It was new to the market, and there’s where part of the problem is. It’s called Mentor’s OB Tape.

Follow up surgery has not rectified the problem. The most recent theory is that the mesh has migrated to other areas of Angela’s body. She is left with problems and pain. The next step is probably another surgery — seek and remove — find those other pieces of mesh in other places, dig them out, replace them, sew them into place. Bloody, messy, ugly, horrible.

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As Every Patient’s Advocate, I read mainstream media, medical and healthcare news all day every day. Study results, reports of medical errors, interviews — you name it, I read it!

One thing I’ve learned over time is that often the headlines, and sometimes the opening paragraphs of any given article, aren’t exactly representative of the real story.

It’s understandable. The people who write the headlines aren’t usually the people who write the stories and articles, too. The headline writer’s job is to condense information in such a way as to suck people into the rest of the story. They “sell” the article to the reader, so it makes sense for them to be sometimes inflammatory, often intriguing, and revealing of only part of the story.

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