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How twitter helped a technology consultant escape from an evil hospital

132 points by gluejar 17y ago

gruseom 17y ago
That is a harrowing story. If it's half true, the hospital really is evil.
- wheaties 17y ago
  Doubt the doctors are the evil ones. If they're using an outdated procedure it means they haven't been kept up to date on the latest treatment protocols. The hospital beaurocrats trying to keep their accredation and earn big bucks, those are the evail ones.
  - fnid 17y ago
    They are evil because they were thinking of themselves before the patient and using lies to intimidate her into agreeing with them -- when they were wrong. That's evil. Unfortunately, it's a story repeated across the nation every day.
    - andreyf 17y ago
      No accreditation means no funding, means no hospital, means no job. So by your definition, the only way doctors can remain doctors at said hospital is by being evil. Hence, I would blame the short-sighedness of whoever created and approved for the rules of accreditation for hospitals, not the people at the whims of those rules.
      - gruseom 17y ago
        If you're right, all it means is that no ethical doctor would remain at said hospital. Ethics only count when they go against one's own interests, otherwise they'd be pointless. I can't believe you're making excuses for doctors who (if the story is true) tried to bully a woman against her will into having major spinal surgery that she clearly didn't need.
        andreyf 17y ago
        Not quite making excuses, just pointing out that the system that necessitates 'evil' behavior is also to blame...
      - DavidSJ 17y ago
        One's choices are never completely at the whim of someone else's rules.
      - dantheman 17y ago
        Wrong, there are many people who may go to that hospital by choice. It only is the act of lying and not obeying the patients wishes that are evil. If they can't keep their accreditation then perhaps they could offer discounts to entice people to their hospital.
      - radu_floricica 17y ago
        Don't downmod this, it has a valid point. It's by far better if the rules of the game don't give incentives to being evil. If they do it's as good as guaranteed that sometime somewhere you will get this kind of incident. Whether you choose to also blame the individuals involved is up to you, but it's the rule-makers who created this.
        zaphar 17y ago
        Every rule system ever designed has the potential to be misinterpreted, misused, and create incentives that were never intended. Rule systems and rule makers can't be held responsible for idiotic/selfish/malicious behavior by individuals. Yes rules and systems can be refined to improve them but ultimately it will always be up to the individual to exercise judgement and moral character. So I'm afraid I have to disagree with you. If you blame the system for being misused you miss the point.
  - gruseom 17y ago
    It's interesting that you try to absolve the doctors by rendering them passive ("they haven't been kept up to date" - whose responsibility is that? and how did they react when presented with correct information?). Most evil happens by default. The same is no doubt the case with the hospital administrators. The interesting characters in the story (again, assuming this is all true) are the sympathetic subordinates - nurses and so on - who supplied information about what was really going on.
gluejar 17y ago
According to the author, the story is being used as fodder by both sides of the healthcare debate. All I can see is the perverse economic incentives on display.
- potatolicious 17y ago
  AFAIK Canada gets around this problem by capping the number of billable patients a doctor can see per day (adjusted by specialty of course). Any patients in excess of the cap is only paid by the government at a steeply discounted rate. This discourages doctors from overworking themselves and offering shoddy care (instead choosing to move patients through like a cattle farm), and also discourages the sort of unnecessary treatment this article talks about.
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    I suspect that the doctors at this hospital would be well under the quota you speak of. Remember, the author suggested the hospital might lose it's accredition for this type of surgery since they didn't do enough of them.
durana 17y ago
The story really doesn't involve Twitter much at all.
- gruseom 17y ago
  But that's not true. It describes her as using Twitter throughout the ordeal. Most importantly, it was through Twitter that she met the ethical neurosurgeon who saved her. Incidentally, her title references "social media" rather than Twitter, which I think is right; it's not hard to imagine, say, Facebook playing the same role. What's relevant is that she got word of her plight out to a network of people in a way that would be harder to do otherwise, and that feedback from this network led to a fundamentally different outcome than that experienced (I imagine) by most people with broken spines who are having unnecessary surgery and narcotics forced on them against their will.
  - jimmybot 17y ago
    Are people that responsive on Facebook?
    - silencio 17y ago
      Perhaps the network doesn't matter as much as who you are connected with and how much they want to help. Those girls that updated their Facebook status instead of calling local emergency services after being stuck in a storm drain eventually got out because a friend called for them (see http://www.switched.com/2009/09/08/endangered-pre-teens-update-facebook-status-instead-of-dialing-9/ http://www.switched.com/2009/09/08/endangered-pre-teens-upda...). I'm sure there's plenty of similar stories out there.
    - cschep 17y ago
      Absolutely. I see people basically chatting in comments on status updates. I think the problem would be more about spreading the story quickly. Twitter doesn't have the "friend" requirement, ultimately making it the better tool(?) here.
      - 17y ago
fnid 17y ago
It never occurred to me that carrying high-level heath insurance would mark me as a candidate for unnecessary surgery. Perhaps this is exactly why health care costs have gone up so dramatically. We have insurance, so the doctors take advantage of it -- needlessly. We very well could be spending a lot less money for the same amount of health care. I think the solution to the health care problem is for someone to start saying NO, like in that other article on the front page now. No to more test, no to unnecessary treatments and surgeries and non-generic drugs. Say no!
- gruseom 17y ago
  We very well could be spending a lot less money for the same amount of health care. ... not to mention greater actual health. When health care was the leading issue in Canada a few years ago and every politician was going around promising to expand it, I remember wondering if I was the only one thinking we need less of it, not more. It might be helpful if we used a more accurate label than "health care" (perhaps "disease industry").
  - windsurfer 17y ago
    Hey, as a Canadian, if you feel you don't want as much health care, just use it less. The system is designed so that people take as much as they need, but not more.
    - DougBTX 17y ago
      Rational appraisal of risks, especially about your own healthcare and as a non-expert, is difficult.
    - pyre 17y ago
      One of the problems in Canada (at least Ontario -- because healthcare is run by the province not the federal government) is people using the emergency room as a doctor's office. This is because regular practice doctor's are regulated on the number of patients they can see (this is an attempt to prevent doctors from seriously overbooking themselves with patients in an attempt act like a 'health factory' where patients are just pushed down an assembly-line) so people have a hard time getting an actual physician. There are a couple of solutions to this, but no one really talks about them. (1) There are plenty of people that are qualified to be doctors, but because they did their medical school in India or China before immigrating to Canada, they aren't allowed to be certified as doctors. (2) Lots of doctors 'jump ship' to more profitable countries like the USA because they can just charge insurance and they aren't regulated from creating a 'factory practice' where no patient ever gets more than 5 minutes of the doctor's time.
DannoHung 17y ago
And the ultimate lesson of all of this: If your friend jumps off a bridge, are you going to jump off of a bridge too?
- gruseom 17y ago
  Although your comment looks like a vacuous redditesque one-liner, I'll respond: I've jumped from similar heights under similar circumstances, i.e. a spot favored by locals, surrounded by people happily jumping and swimming. It's only in hindsight that what she did was an obviously bad move, and even then it sounds like a slightly different angle would have made it harmless. This aspect is hardly "the ultimate lesson of all this": if the post were merely about someone who jumped into a pond when they shouldn't have, no one would be discussing it.
  - jimmybot 17y ago
    Three other people were injured that day from jumping, and the ambulance that was called wasn't even called for the heroine of our story. I don't know what the denominator is, but it doesn't sound good. I do agree though, that jumping or not wasn't the main issue here.
    - axod 17y ago
      Parents often do silly things for their kids :/ It's sort of beside the point as you say.
    - pyre 17y ago
      Seems like it was a 'hot spot' because people used it often. Sure she says that other people were injured, but how badly? It's possible that her injury was the worse injury anyone has ever sustained from jumping there. If that's the case, and parents still encourage/let their children jump from that bridge, I would say it's a problem. (Not that I would ever let my kids jump from a 50' bridge, at least not until they're old enough to make decisions on their own -- I'm not advocating 'babying' your children after they've left the nest.)
  - 17y ago
andreyf 17y ago
Oi, that sure was lengthy. Summary: Some hospital in Pennsylvania tries to make money by doing unnecessary procedures on patients with good health insurance and went to great lengths to keep this lady from seeking a second opinion regarding her injury. IMO, this is the incentive of nearly all doctors in America - the dentists I've had span the entire spectrum of opinions about my wisdom teeth. From "if we don't take them out, you can die from a gum infection" to "do they hurt? no? do you eat meat? then you should keep them, they'll makes it easier to chew".
- davidw 17y ago
  About 15 years ago, the dentist I went to said dire things about the immense pain my wisdom teeth were going to cause in my immediate future. I told him I'd make an appointment right away when that happened, even though his advice was to intervene as soon as possible to 'avoid any future problems'. I still have all of them and aside from the occasional twinge, they are just fine.
  - pyre 17y ago
    It's not necessarily about money though. To my knowledge, most people have problems with their wisdom teeth coming in wrong and screwing up their other teeth. If this is the majority case, then going on the offensive and taking care of them early can make sense rather than waiting to have issues. Sometimes these cases end up sounding to me like the people who try to decry the state laws requiring you to wear a seatbelt by pointing out the relatively few cases where not wearing a seatbelt did save (or could have saved) someone's life. They completely ignore the overwhelming number of cases where seatbelts do save people's lives. It's just a case of people trying to make the facts fit a conclusion that they've already come to and don't want to change.
    - zargon 17y ago
      That comparison is like saying that when someone gets diagnosed with diabetes, they should preemptively amputate their feet so as to avoid trouble with them later.
JulianMorrison 17y ago
Raze that place to the ground, and throw those "medical" staff in jail for life.
caa09hh 17y ago
That is an amazing story!
caa09hh 17y ago
Its also why we need to fix healthcare.
benatkin 17y ago
Since that time, people on both sides of the health care debate have listened to my story and pointed out it supports their views, both pro and con. Unsurprising. I think this is more about patients' rights than healthcare funding, though.
- SarahCortes 17y ago
  True, but clearly that some have too little and others, relatively, too much- i think that was a major issue in my situation.
- pyre 17y ago
  Yea. I can see people on both sides saying crap about this. Pro: This wouldn't happen with government healthcare because there would be standards in place (i.e. the 'mobility test' would be standard everywhere not just in 'cutting edge' facilities) Con: In government-run healthcare, she would have been forced to stay in that hospital so as to minimize the costs of treating her (i.e. no expensive transport from PA to Boston). The government would be taking away her individual rights to take ownership of her situation. The healthcare debate is a lot more nuanced than the 'Arg! Socialism!' or 'Arg! Health insurance is evil!' crowds make it out to be.
  - desu 17y ago
    Well, it's more like the pro is that there is no profit motive to keep her there. The staff would be delighted to get rid of her to a bigger facility elsewhere. I live a kilometre north of a large hospital in Sydney, Australia and we get helicopters coming in all hours of the day and night, presumably doing just that. The "con" would probably be that there would be no facility for spinal surgery in a rural area in the first place. She would not be able to choose to be treated there and she's getting on one of those helicopters.
    - benatkin 17y ago
      Interesting. Yeah, it does sound like if either group has their way, it very likely could have a side effect of preventing this particular scenario from happening again.
DEinspanjer 17y ago
I wonder if the treatment was really all about the "really great health insurance" and not just the doctors at the hospital deciding that they knew better than another doctor many hours away that had not seen the patient or the pictures of her spine. Upon reading the description of how the accident took place, my first thought was, "Really, is her insurance going to pay for that!?" And according to the last comment on her blog post, apparently the answer is, "No." I would imagine either hospital would have to have enough familiarity with that type of accident to question whether her insurance would cover it as well.
- SarahCortes 17y ago
  Ah,is that really a question? My comment on my blog that my health insurance decided it was best to leave me on the ledge to die of exposure was-need I say-tongue in cheek.You must be under the impression the insurance companies are in possession of that awesome perfect blame calculator - parsing an infinite number of scenarios to detemine blame for accidents and disease, then confirm or deny coverage based on their magic box. That is your insurance company, not mine. Please reply quickly, unless you are tied up arguing with them about whether they should cover your AIDS since everyone knows sharing needles is unsafe.
  - nkassis 17y ago
    I got too say, I would be surprised if an insurance would not cover something like this. This is equivalent to a sports injury. Frankly no one can tell me that jumping off a cliff mountain biking is less dangerous than a bridge jump. I've bridge jumped before (not fifty feet I believe but high) and I wasn't the only one around, I didn't think it was that dangerous at the time but I understand how a bad landing could cause such an injury. Hell Olympic divers have really bad landings doing 33 feet dive and don't die.
    - DEinspanjer 17y ago
      The reason I questioned whether they would cover this is because in the past I've seen exclusion clauses that stated an insurance company would not cover extreme sports related injuries with a standard health insurance policy. The examples I remember for extreme sports were things like base jumping and bungee jumping and parachuting. I don't pretend to know much about this stuff. I did state that it was just a question I had. If insurance companies routinely cover people who have accidents while doing things significantly more dangerous than your typical day to day activities then that is great... I guess. The first part of my comment still stands regardless. I wonder how much of the battle was over getting insurance money and how much of it might have been over the doctor's ego.
rdouble 17y ago
My dad's a doctor in a rural environment, and I had a bad back injury including ruptured discs and cracked vertebrae when I was in high school. I can offer some insight on the psychology of the doctors and even a little bit of information on this particular injury. A rural surgeon is going to be professionally offended if their patient calls up an egghead at Harvard from their pre-op hospital bed and then tells him she doesn't trust his judgement and instead wants to be medivac airlifted back to Boston. It's like when you watch a detective show when the FBI takes over and the local cops are all bent out of shape. The hospital staff may have been thinking about health insurance and losing their accreditation but I doubt it was a sinister plot to meet their spinal surgery quotas. It was probably more along these lines: "a crazy lady from Boston just broke her back jumping off a bridge with some 13 year olds. Now she's telling us to schedule a chopper to Boston because she's Facebook buddies with some prick neurology prof at Harvard. Quick, give her some morphine and get her under the knife before her spinal column collapses and she's paralyzed and we get slapped with a half billion dollar malpractice suit... " Note that I'm not defending that sort of attitude. That's just what I think they would be thinking, rather than some nefarious conspiracy to maximize insurance profits, which is what the article and most commenters on this post seem to be suggesting. The other thing is that I don't think the doctors were necessarily wrong in their diagnosis. The higher you go up in the spine, there's a lot more danger of paralysis or other severe spinal cord problem. If you're over 30 and shatter your T12, there's a 50% chance you're going to end up with a serious neurological problem. The odds for recovery are far better the sooner you have surgery, if the surgery is necessary. Timing of surgery is also an important issue in the treatment of thoracic spine fractures. ... Some studies suggest that patients with thoracic spine fractures treated within 72 hours, irrespective of concomitant injuries, do much better physiologically postoperatively than those in whom stabilization is delayed. http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1267029-treatment http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1267029-treatment Lastly, I don't think a patient requested 370 mile helicopter flight for a treatment which could be performed locally could possibly be covered under any insurance plan, no matter how good the coverage is.
- param 17y ago
  I want to agree with you, but what I am interested in knowing is why the boston doctor was insisting on a mobility test prior to surgery and why the small town folks were insisting on surgery first. The same thing happens in small town India as well where doctors are more interested in keeping you admitted above and beyond the needed duration and doctors in large cities are just better because they have a greater patient load to be well versed with complex surgeries if needed.
marze 17y ago
This seems like a situation where knowing a certain phrase might help. I don't know what that phrase might, but a lawyer or someone else familiar with the medical industry might. Something like "I will not authorize you to perform this procedure and have notified my physician and lawyer of this, if you perform anything that I have not authorized will result in an expensive lawsuit" or something. Anyone know what the right terms to use are? It seems in other situations there are magic words that can be used to produce immediate results.
- Kadin 17y ago
  You can always -- provided you are sane, sober, and alert -- decline treatment or even just check yourself out of the hospital "against medical advice." Generally this involves signing some forms releasing the hospital from all responsibility for you. And then you can just walk out. Hospital personnel will try to strongly discourage you from doing this -- not because they're evil, but because in most situations it's a really, really bad idea. But if you just keep saying "no, I don't want treatment, I want to leave, give me the forms to sign out AMA," and you're not clearly nuts or high on morphine or otherwise impaired, you can pretty much just leave. However, unless you have a very specific reason for believing that the treatment protocol at work isn't correct or best for you, it's generally a bad idea.
skybrian 17y ago
"According to Ithaca Fire Department statistics, Lowe was the fifteenth person to die in Ithaca's gorges since 2000—and the fourth to drown in that particular pool since 1986. When most people think of gorge deaths, they think of the jumpers who have given Cornell an unwanted (and unwarranted) reputation as a suicide hot spot. But Ithaca Police Officer Doug Hoyt estimates that about half of those fifteen deaths were accidents caused by turbulent water, slippery rocks, fallen trees, and a host of other natural features. The local community has mourned each death. But Lowe's passing—coming in the wake of the drowning the previous year of Jeevan Mykoo, a thirty-year-old tourist from Ottawa, and the 2006 death of Navin Parthasarathy, a visiting graduate student from the University of California, Santa Barbara—has spurred a widespread debate about how to deal with the dangers and appeals of one of Cornell's great natural attractions." http://cornellalumnimagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=264 http://cornellalumnimagazine.com/index.php?option=com_conten...
theklub 17y ago
This really just amounts to part of the Twitter Hype machine.

132 points by gluejar 17y ago

gruseom 17y ago

That is a harrowing story. If it's half true, the hospital really is evil.

wheaties 17y ago
Doubt the doctors are the evil ones. If they're using an outdated procedure it means they haven't been kept up to date on the latest treatment protocols. The hospital beaurocrats trying to keep their accredation and earn big bucks, those are the evail ones.
- fnid 17y ago
  They are evil because they were thinking of themselves before the patient and using lies to intimidate her into agreeing with them -- when they were wrong. That's evil. Unfortunately, it's a story repeated across the nation every day.
  - andreyf 17y ago
    No accreditation means no funding, means no hospital, means no job. So by your definition, the only way doctors can remain doctors at said hospital is by being evil. Hence, I would blame the short-sighedness of whoever created and approved for the rules of accreditation for hospitals, not the people at the whims of those rules.
    - gruseom 17y ago
      If you're right, all it means is that no ethical doctor would remain at said hospital. Ethics only count when they go against one's own interests, otherwise they'd be pointless. I can't believe you're making excuses for doctors who (if the story is true) tried to bully a woman against her will into having major spinal surgery that she clearly didn't need.
      - andreyf 17y ago
        Not quite making excuses, just pointing out that the system that necessitates 'evil' behavior is also to blame...
    - DavidSJ 17y ago
      One's choices are never completely at the whim of someone else's rules.
    - dantheman 17y ago
      Wrong, there are many people who may go to that hospital by choice. It only is the act of lying and not obeying the patients wishes that are evil. If they can't keep their accreditation then perhaps they could offer discounts to entice people to their hospital.
    - radu_floricica 17y ago
      Don't downmod this, it has a valid point. It's by far better if the rules of the game don't give incentives to being evil. If they do it's as good as guaranteed that sometime somewhere you will get this kind of incident. Whether you choose to also blame the individuals involved is up to you, but it's the rule-makers who created this.
      - zaphar 17y ago
        Every rule system ever designed has the potential to be misinterpreted, misused, and create incentives that were never intended. Rule systems and rule makers can't be held responsible for idiotic/selfish/malicious behavior by individuals. Yes rules and systems can be refined to improve them but ultimately it will always be up to the individual to exercise judgement and moral character. So I'm afraid I have to disagree with you. If you blame the system for being misused you miss the point.
- gruseom 17y ago
  It's interesting that you try to absolve the doctors by rendering them passive ("they haven't been kept up to date" - whose responsibility is that? and how did they react when presented with correct information?). Most evil happens by default. The same is no doubt the case with the hospital administrators. The interesting characters in the story (again, assuming this is all true) are the sympathetic subordinates - nurses and so on - who supplied information about what was really going on.

gluejar 17y ago

According to the author, the story is being used as fodder by both sides of the healthcare debate. All I can see is the perverse economic incentives on display.

potatolicious 17y ago
AFAIK Canada gets around this problem by capping the number of billable patients a doctor can see per day (adjusted by specialty of course). Any patients in excess of the cap is only paid by the government at a steeply discounted rate. This discourages doctors from overworking themselves and offering shoddy care (instead choosing to move patients through like a cattle farm), and also discourages the sort of unnecessary treatment this article talks about.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  I suspect that the doctors at this hospital would be well under the quota you speak of. Remember, the author suggested the hospital might lose it's accredition for this type of surgery since they didn't do enough of them.

durana 17y ago

The story really doesn't involve Twitter much at all.

gruseom 17y ago
But that's not true. It describes her as using Twitter throughout the ordeal. Most importantly, it was through Twitter that she met the ethical neurosurgeon who saved her. Incidentally, her title references "social media" rather than Twitter, which I think is right; it's not hard to imagine, say, Facebook playing the same role. What's relevant is that she got word of her plight out to a network of people in a way that would be harder to do otherwise, and that feedback from this network led to a fundamentally different outcome than that experienced (I imagine) by most people with broken spines who are having unnecessary surgery and narcotics forced on them against their will.
- jimmybot 17y ago
  Are people that responsive on Facebook?
  - silencio 17y ago
    Perhaps the network doesn't matter as much as who you are connected with and how much they want to help. Those girls that updated their Facebook status instead of calling local emergency services after being stuck in a storm drain eventually got out because a friend called for them (see http://www.switched.com/2009/09/08/endangered-pre-teens-update-facebook-status-instead-of-dialing-9/ http://www.switched.com/2009/09/08/endangered-pre-teens-upda...). I'm sure there's plenty of similar stories out there.
  - cschep 17y ago
    Absolutely. I see people basically chatting in comments on status updates. I think the problem would be more about spreading the story quickly. Twitter doesn't have the "friend" requirement, ultimately making it the better tool(?) here.
    - 17y ago

fnid 17y ago

It never occurred to me that carrying high-level heath insurance would mark me as a candidate for unnecessary surgery. Perhaps this is exactly why health care costs have gone up so dramatically. We have insurance, so the doctors take advantage of it -- needlessly. We very well could be spending a lot less money for the same amount of health care. I think the solution to the health care problem is for someone to start saying NO, like in that other article on the front page now. No to more test, no to unnecessary treatments and surgeries and non-generic drugs. Say no!

gruseom 17y ago
We very well could be spending a lot less money for the same amount of health care. ... not to mention greater actual health. When health care was the leading issue in Canada a few years ago and every politician was going around promising to expand it, I remember wondering if I was the only one thinking we need less of it, not more. It might be helpful if we used a more accurate label than "health care" (perhaps "disease industry").
- windsurfer 17y ago
  Hey, as a Canadian, if you feel you don't want as much health care, just use it less. The system is designed so that people take as much as they need, but not more.
  - DougBTX 17y ago
    Rational appraisal of risks, especially about your own healthcare and as a non-expert, is difficult.
  - pyre 17y ago
    One of the problems in Canada (at least Ontario -- because healthcare is run by the province not the federal government) is people using the emergency room as a doctor's office. This is because regular practice doctor's are regulated on the number of patients they can see (this is an attempt to prevent doctors from seriously overbooking themselves with patients in an attempt act like a 'health factory' where patients are just pushed down an assembly-line) so people have a hard time getting an actual physician. There are a couple of solutions to this, but no one really talks about them. (1) There are plenty of people that are qualified to be doctors, but because they did their medical school in India or China before immigrating to Canada, they aren't allowed to be certified as doctors. (2) Lots of doctors 'jump ship' to more profitable countries like the USA because they can just charge insurance and they aren't regulated from creating a 'factory practice' where no patient ever gets more than 5 minutes of the doctor's time.

DannoHung 17y ago

And the ultimate lesson of all of this: If your friend jumps off a bridge, are you going to jump off of a bridge too?

gruseom 17y ago
Although your comment looks like a vacuous redditesque one-liner, I'll respond: I've jumped from similar heights under similar circumstances, i.e. a spot favored by locals, surrounded by people happily jumping and swimming. It's only in hindsight that what she did was an obviously bad move, and even then it sounds like a slightly different angle would have made it harmless. This aspect is hardly "the ultimate lesson of all this": if the post were merely about someone who jumped into a pond when they shouldn't have, no one would be discussing it.
- jimmybot 17y ago
  Three other people were injured that day from jumping, and the ambulance that was called wasn't even called for the heroine of our story. I don't know what the denominator is, but it doesn't sound good. I do agree though, that jumping or not wasn't the main issue here.
  - axod 17y ago
    Parents often do silly things for their kids :/ It's sort of beside the point as you say.
  - pyre 17y ago
    Seems like it was a 'hot spot' because people used it often. Sure she says that other people were injured, but how badly? It's possible that her injury was the worse injury anyone has ever sustained from jumping there. If that's the case, and parents still encourage/let their children jump from that bridge, I would say it's a problem. (Not that I would ever let my kids jump from a 50' bridge, at least not until they're old enough to make decisions on their own -- I'm not advocating 'babying' your children after they've left the nest.)
- 17y ago

andreyf 17y ago

Oi, that sure was lengthy. Summary: Some hospital in Pennsylvania tries to make money by doing unnecessary procedures on patients with good health insurance and went to great lengths to keep this lady from seeking a second opinion regarding her injury. IMO, this is the incentive of nearly all doctors in America - the dentists I've had span the entire spectrum of opinions about my wisdom teeth. From "if we don't take them out, you can die from a gum infection" to "do they hurt? no? do you eat meat? then you should keep them, they'll makes it easier to chew".

davidw 17y ago
About 15 years ago, the dentist I went to said dire things about the immense pain my wisdom teeth were going to cause in my immediate future. I told him I'd make an appointment right away when that happened, even though his advice was to intervene as soon as possible to 'avoid any future problems'. I still have all of them and aside from the occasional twinge, they are just fine.
- pyre 17y ago
  It's not necessarily about money though. To my knowledge, most people have problems with their wisdom teeth coming in wrong and screwing up their other teeth. If this is the majority case, then going on the offensive and taking care of them early can make sense rather than waiting to have issues. Sometimes these cases end up sounding to me like the people who try to decry the state laws requiring you to wear a seatbelt by pointing out the relatively few cases where not wearing a seatbelt did save (or could have saved) someone's life. They completely ignore the overwhelming number of cases where seatbelts do save people's lives. It's just a case of people trying to make the facts fit a conclusion that they've already come to and don't want to change.
  - zargon 17y ago
    That comparison is like saying that when someone gets diagnosed with diabetes, they should preemptively amputate their feet so as to avoid trouble with them later.

JulianMorrison 17y ago

Raze that place to the ground, and throw those "medical" staff in jail for life.

caa09hh 17y ago

That is an amazing story!

caa09hh 17y ago

Its also why we need to fix healthcare.

benatkin 17y ago

Since that time, people on both sides of the health care debate have listened to my story and pointed out it supports their views, both pro and con. Unsurprising. I think this is more about patients' rights than healthcare funding, though.

SarahCortes 17y ago
True, but clearly that some have too little and others, relatively, too much- i think that was a major issue in my situation.
pyre 17y ago
Yea. I can see people on both sides saying crap about this. Pro: This wouldn't happen with government healthcare because there would be standards in place (i.e. the 'mobility test' would be standard everywhere not just in 'cutting edge' facilities) Con: In government-run healthcare, she would have been forced to stay in that hospital so as to minimize the costs of treating her (i.e. no expensive transport from PA to Boston). The government would be taking away her individual rights to take ownership of her situation. The healthcare debate is a lot more nuanced than the 'Arg! Socialism!' or 'Arg! Health insurance is evil!' crowds make it out to be.
- desu 17y ago
  Well, it's more like the pro is that there is no profit motive to keep her there. The staff would be delighted to get rid of her to a bigger facility elsewhere. I live a kilometre north of a large hospital in Sydney, Australia and we get helicopters coming in all hours of the day and night, presumably doing just that. The "con" would probably be that there would be no facility for spinal surgery in a rural area in the first place. She would not be able to choose to be treated there and she's getting on one of those helicopters.
  - benatkin 17y ago
    Interesting. Yeah, it does sound like if either group has their way, it very likely could have a side effect of preventing this particular scenario from happening again.

DEinspanjer 17y ago

I wonder if the treatment was really all about the "really great health insurance" and not just the doctors at the hospital deciding that they knew better than another doctor many hours away that had not seen the patient or the pictures of her spine. Upon reading the description of how the accident took place, my first thought was, "Really, is her insurance going to pay for that!?" And according to the last comment on her blog post, apparently the answer is, "No." I would imagine either hospital would have to have enough familiarity with that type of accident to question whether her insurance would cover it as well.

SarahCortes 17y ago
Ah,is that really a question? My comment on my blog that my health insurance decided it was best to leave me on the ledge to die of exposure was-need I say-tongue in cheek.You must be under the impression the insurance companies are in possession of that awesome perfect blame calculator - parsing an infinite number of scenarios to detemine blame for accidents and disease, then confirm or deny coverage based on their magic box. That is your insurance company, not mine. Please reply quickly, unless you are tied up arguing with them about whether they should cover your AIDS since everyone knows sharing needles is unsafe.
- nkassis 17y ago
  I got too say, I would be surprised if an insurance would not cover something like this. This is equivalent to a sports injury. Frankly no one can tell me that jumping off a cliff mountain biking is less dangerous than a bridge jump. I've bridge jumped before (not fifty feet I believe but high) and I wasn't the only one around, I didn't think it was that dangerous at the time but I understand how a bad landing could cause such an injury. Hell Olympic divers have really bad landings doing 33 feet dive and don't die.
  - DEinspanjer 17y ago
    The reason I questioned whether they would cover this is because in the past I've seen exclusion clauses that stated an insurance company would not cover extreme sports related injuries with a standard health insurance policy. The examples I remember for extreme sports were things like base jumping and bungee jumping and parachuting. I don't pretend to know much about this stuff. I did state that it was just a question I had. If insurance companies routinely cover people who have accidents while doing things significantly more dangerous than your typical day to day activities then that is great... I guess. The first part of my comment still stands regardless. I wonder how much of the battle was over getting insurance money and how much of it might have been over the doctor's ego.

rdouble 17y ago

My dad's a doctor in a rural environment, and I had a bad back injury including ruptured discs and cracked vertebrae when I was in high school. I can offer some insight on the psychology of the doctors and even a little bit of information on this particular injury. A rural surgeon is going to be professionally offended if their patient calls up an egghead at Harvard from their pre-op hospital bed and then tells him she doesn't trust his judgement and instead wants to be medivac airlifted back to Boston. It's like when you watch a detective show when the FBI takes over and the local cops are all bent out of shape. The hospital staff may have been thinking about health insurance and losing their accreditation but I doubt it was a sinister plot to meet their spinal surgery quotas. It was probably more along these lines: "a crazy lady from Boston just broke her back jumping off a bridge with some 13 year olds. Now she's telling us to schedule a chopper to Boston because she's Facebook buddies with some prick neurology prof at Harvard. Quick, give her some morphine and get her under the knife before her spinal column collapses and she's paralyzed and we get slapped with a half billion dollar malpractice suit... " Note that I'm not defending that sort of attitude. That's just what I think they would be thinking, rather than some nefarious conspiracy to maximize insurance profits, which is what the article and most commenters on this post seem to be suggesting. The other thing is that I don't think the doctors were necessarily wrong in their diagnosis. The higher you go up in the spine, there's a lot more danger of paralysis or other severe spinal cord problem. If you're over 30 and shatter your T12, there's a 50% chance you're going to end up with a serious neurological problem. The odds for recovery are far better the sooner you have surgery, if the surgery is necessary. Timing of surgery is also an important issue in the treatment of thoracic spine fractures. ... Some studies suggest that patients with thoracic spine fractures treated within 72 hours, irrespective of concomitant injuries, do much better physiologically postoperatively than those in whom stabilization is delayed. http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1267029-treatment http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1267029-treatment Lastly, I don't think a patient requested 370 mile helicopter flight for a treatment which could be performed locally could possibly be covered under any insurance plan, no matter how good the coverage is.

param 17y ago
I want to agree with you, but what I am interested in knowing is why the boston doctor was insisting on a mobility test prior to surgery and why the small town folks were insisting on surgery first. The same thing happens in small town India as well where doctors are more interested in keeping you admitted above and beyond the needed duration and doctors in large cities are just better because they have a greater patient load to be well versed with complex surgeries if needed.

marze 17y ago

This seems like a situation where knowing a certain phrase might help. I don't know what that phrase might, but a lawyer or someone else familiar with the medical industry might. Something like "I will not authorize you to perform this procedure and have notified my physician and lawyer of this, if you perform anything that I have not authorized will result in an expensive lawsuit" or something. Anyone know what the right terms to use are? It seems in other situations there are magic words that can be used to produce immediate results.

Kadin 17y ago
You can always -- provided you are sane, sober, and alert -- decline treatment or even just check yourself out of the hospital "against medical advice." Generally this involves signing some forms releasing the hospital from all responsibility for you. And then you can just walk out. Hospital personnel will try to strongly discourage you from doing this -- not because they're evil, but because in most situations it's a really, really bad idea. But if you just keep saying "no, I don't want treatment, I want to leave, give me the forms to sign out AMA," and you're not clearly nuts or high on morphine or otherwise impaired, you can pretty much just leave. However, unless you have a very specific reason for believing that the treatment protocol at work isn't correct or best for you, it's generally a bad idea.

skybrian 17y ago

"According to Ithaca Fire Department statistics, Lowe was the fifteenth person to die in Ithaca's gorges since 2000—and the fourth to drown in that particular pool since 1986. When most people think of gorge deaths, they think of the jumpers who have given Cornell an unwanted (and unwarranted) reputation as a suicide hot spot. But Ithaca Police Officer Doug Hoyt estimates that about half of those fifteen deaths were accidents caused by turbulent water, slippery rocks, fallen trees, and a host of other natural features. The local community has mourned each death. But Lowe's passing—coming in the wake of the drowning the previous year of Jeevan Mykoo, a thirty-year-old tourist from Ottawa, and the 2006 death of Navin Parthasarathy, a visiting graduate student from the University of California, Santa Barbara—has spurred a widespread debate about how to deal with the dangers and appeals of one of Cornell's great natural attractions." http://cornellalumnimagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=264 http://cornellalumnimagazine.com/index.php?option=com_conten...

theklub 17y ago

This really just amounts to part of the Twitter Hype machine.