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I attended a conference on pulmonary medicine once. There was a surgeon speaking about his trip he took to China. He had removed a tumor from a patients lung
by giarc 12y ago
I attended a conference on pulmonary medicine once. There was a surgeon speaking about his trip he took to China. He had removed a tumor from a patients lung and had to carry it out of the OR theatre and physically show the family. They had paid for the procedure, travelled a long way to the hospital, they demanded to see that there was actually a tumor, and that the surgeon had actually removed it. Apparently this is common in China.
- jonnathanson 12y agoSomething like that seems crazy to us, but I can sort of understand why it made sense to the family in China. China's medical system is presumably a lot less regulated, and probably full of its fair share of hucksters, snake oil salesmen, and fraudulent service providers. Demanding to see proof that a surgery was performed would be understandable in those circumstances. (An unscrupulous doctor could still fake the proof, of course.) This is thematically, if not completely, similar to the American practice of running a battery of expensive, redundant diagnostic tests on a patient as a CYA measure. It's not enough to have a reasonable guess at a diagnosis; you need five different kinds of proof to back up your decision. You are performing not just to the standards of medicine, but to the presumed standards of insurance companies, lawyers, and WebMD self-diagnoses.
- giarc 12y ago>An unscrupulous doctor could still fake the proof, of course. Exactly, how is a family to know what is a tumor and what is just regular tissue. Heck, it could be a pig liver and not many would know the difference. Combine this with the fact that the surgeons at this talk mentioned that Chinese doctors and nurses are not well paid, you can start to see the incentive for doc's to commit fraud.