– Hey everyone, it’s Dr. Zubin Damania. Okay, check it out, a lot of people have asked me to listen to Dr. Death, a podcast by Wonder Spirit or Wonderwall or some company. I listened to the first episode and it sounded overproduced with a lot of dramatic music, so I couldn’t listen to the rest, but I got the basic premise.

This guy, Dr. Duntsch, spine surgeon, is a butcher, a psychopath, a murderer, and a maimer of human beings, should never have been allowed to practice and should have been stopped much earlier, before he destroyed the lives of multiple patients. The takeaway for me was, well yeah, this should have been stopped, this guy’s a criminal, and he’s not a surgeon by any stretch of the imagination in terms of what he did to these poor people. But here’s the part that no one talks about.

Everybody’s up in arms, like, he should have been stopped. What they don’t realize is, short of the psychopathic murderer, there are a ton, a ton of medical practitioners around the country who are just simply not that good. And in many ways, that’s worse. Because what happens is patients have no idea which doctors are actually going to be dangerously incompetent for their particular procedure or just not good or have lots of complications.

But you know who knows those things? The other healthcare people, the nurses, the doctors. If you ask them, well, who wouldn’t you let operate on you, or who wouldn’t you go to? They will tell you, without batting an eyelid, if you ask them, these are the doctors we call “007” in the slang, which is licensed to kill. We wouldn’t let them touch our dog, let alone our family member, and here’s the dirty secret.

Yet they continue to practice, why? Because of the culture of medicine. And I’ll tell you what I think it is. I think it’s because each of us is afraid that when the spotlight is shined on us and they look through our stuff, what if we did something wrong that we didn’t, you know, we didn’t know about? Or what if we’re not good enough? And people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. So I’m not gonna attack Dr. Smith over there, because then they’re gonna shine the light on me. Plus, culturally, it’s not cool to attack a colleague.

But here’s the thing, we are sworn to do no harm. It is doing harm to know that somebody is incompetent, is maybe suffering with substance abuse, untreated mental illness because it’s a stigma to talk about mental illness, or is just not competent and is doing more than they should be able to do. It is a stigma culturally to actually bring that to light.

Now, when you look at the Dr. Death thing, this was obviously over-the-top insane, should never have happened. But this is repeated on a smaller, yet no less devastating, scale all over the country every single day in every single hospital. I knew when I was training, I knew who the drunks were, I knew who the surgeon was who had all the complications, ’cause I would then have to consult on those complications. I knew the people I wouldn’t let touch anybody I cared about, and I didn’t refer to them.

But at the same time, I didn’t go to the medical board and go, I have these concerns, because then the light is on us. And it’s a deep shame, I think, that we have. And so, now I’m trying to right some of this by saying, listen guys, we need to, first of all, help our colleagues if they’re suffering with substance abuse, mental illness, et cetera. If one of our colleagues is one of these problem doctors, there should be a mechanism where we report to the board, where they can get more education, more guidance. And if that fails, then they have to be stopped. They can’t continue to harm patients. And we all, I’m looking at you, guys, everyone in healthcare, we all know this is true. Just like we all know that one nurse on the floor who’s dangerous, like, we all know the one, you know, outpatient doctor that we would never send our patients to, and yet, what do we do, guys?

We do nothing about it, it’s time that that changed. If you agree with me, hit share, hit like, leave a comment, leave a story, leave your questions, leave your concerns, tell me I’m full of it.

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