The Great Infection Deflection, Part 2

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" WC Douglass " <realhealth

Daily Dose - The Great Infection Deflection, Part 2

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 07:15:00 -0400

 

 

 

 

Daily Dose

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September 02, 2005

 

 

The Great Infection Deflection, part 2

 

After reading of the low-seeming infection numbers Pennsylvania

hospitals voluntarily reported to the state in 2004, I started

thinking about what criteria hospitals - which are first and foremost

businesses concerned with profitability - would most likely use to

determine their own culpability in spreading killer infections. And

although I don't have a copy of the actual Pennsylvania report in

front of me, I do have four decades of experience with the way

mainstream medicine works, and I can tell you this:

 

No hospital, anywhere, admits liability for anything without being

forced to, or at least being confronted with the reality that they

WOULD be forced to if push came to shove.

 

Kind of like with the drug companies, it usually takes people getting

sick or dying and their relatives crying " foul " in the media or in the

courtroom before anyone in the medical establishment is forced into

accountability for mistakes. Need proof? Research reveals how hard it

is to prove medical malpractice in anything but a wrong-limb-amputated

or donor-heart-dropped-on-the-floor kind of case. This would be

especially true over something as nebulous and hard to pin down as a

hospital-borne infection.

 

Think about it. The very first thing any hospital could say in defense

is: Can you PROVE your mother/father/wife/child didn't contract this

killer infection before admission?

 

As anyone knows, you can't prove a negative. Unless a patient had the

foresight, time, money, and energy to have themselves tested for every

one of the dozens of common types of infections floating around most

hospitals the hour before their admission, how could it be proven that

they picked up a bug in the hospital and not in the cab on the ride over?

 

And of course, it wouldn't make sense for hospitals to do this kind of

advance screening before you go under the knife or into the

examination room. That would both delay their lucrative " turnstile

medicine " rate of patient turnover and rob them of their plausible

deniability in the all-too-common case of infection-related illness or

death.

 

The bottom line is this: That report I mentioned in the first part of

this essay which catalogued the nearly 12,000 patients sickened and

1,800 patients killed by infections in the Keystone State must surely

represent only the most egregious, blatant,

provable-beyond-doubt-in-a-court-of-law examples of hospital-borne

infection...

 

In other words, the undeniable cases that couldn't possibly have any

explanation other than pure, cut-and-dried hospital liability.

Admitting ANY except these would expose the medical centers to a

tsunami of litigation. That means the REAL incidence of infection is

probably 10 times that high. Easily.

 

You aren't defenseless, though: Keep reading and I'll tell you a few

things you can do...

 

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Here are some fundamentals I haven't mentioned in a while - namely,

three specific ways to reduce your risk of contracting a

hospital-borne infection...

 

Here they are:

 

* Make sure everyone who touches you at the hospital - doctors,

nurses, orderlies, X-ray technicians, or anyone else - has first

washed their hands with soap and warm water. If that means you need to

speak up and ask them, so be it. It isn't rude to protect your life.

* Before admission, take a thorough shower with any good

non-antibacterial soap.

* Prior to any procedure, ask your doctor to perform a nose

culture for Staphylococcus. Folks who carry Staph infections are more

vulnerable to the mutated forms of the bacteria rampant in hospitals.

Also, a negative culture provides some baseline proof should a

hospital-borne Staph infection occur.

 

Do these things and you'll be giving yourself as powerful an advantage

as possible against the onslaught of potentially killer bacteria

you'll face once you're located in a hospital bed. Of course, the best

defense is to avoid the place altogether...

 

That's not always possible, unfortunately. If you must take your

chances at some point, take as few of them as you can.

 

But be under no illusions: Your risk of coming home from the hospital

with a deadly infection is many times greater than the 1,000-to-1 shot

that certain state health departments would have you believe.

 

Revealing, not concealing,

 

William Campbell Douglass II, MD

 

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