Re: a now-deleted comment about how doctors elsewhere in the world suffer strict consequences for their actions, rather than getting "turned a blind eye": That

Re: a now-deleted comment about how doctors elsewhere in the world suffer strict consequences for their actions, rather than getting "turned a blind eye": That still happens in the US regulatory environment as well! Implicit to "we'll turn a blind eye" is the context "as long as you do the due diligence of creating an alternative above-board explanation for what you were doing, so that there's no official record of your heterodox practice." The most serious and flagrant example of this effect occurs in assisted suicides. It is malfeasance to knowingly kill a patient, and even if no criminal charges occur, you'll have your license to practice permanently revoked if it can be proven that that was your intent. So no doctor who sets out to assist a patient in suicide ever has the words "assisted suicide" come out of their mouths in a provable way. Instead, they talk about "optimizing quality of life" and "mitigating suffering", through the mechanisms of large doses of drugs that can coincidentally, potentially cause death. As long as the death can be justified with the above-board explanation ("the patient's pain was so great that they needed this amount of narcotics to rest; and then this dose of narcotics ended up stopping their breathing during the night, and by the time a nurse responded, they were already gone") then the medical establishment — who 100% knows what the doctor was really doing — lets it go. But if the doctor doesn't bother to hide their approach behind a justification like this? Then they get the book thrown at them.