(Just a thought for those who want folks like me to "shut up about it", "get over it" and "move on".)
Now that most of the investigating is done in the Earl Bradley case, and the indictments are in, the journalists at CBS are all over the issue of "pedophile pediatricians":
Over the last decade alone, in states across the country, nearly 20 pediatricians have been charged with abusing children. Those are the criminal cases, but most complaints never get past state medical boards.
Pediatrician Eli Newberger is a professor at Harvard Medical School. He compares pediatric child abuse to the priest scandal that rocked the Catholic Church.
"We're dealing, I think, with a systemic problem, in which there is a reluctance to act on the part of colleagues for the various business and collegial reasons, and an organized cover-up," Newberger said.
But wait! (Insert sarcasm) Methodical, organized cover-ups do not happen in medicine. Especially NOT in Piedmont, North Carolina. It just doesn't happen.
And it's not like Dr. Mary Johnson hasn't been talking about the North Carolina Medical Board's fundamental failures in oversight . . . or protecting doctors that do report medical badness . . . for, oh I don't know, FIVE YEARS.
And our legal system couldn't possibly SUCK more at dealing with child abuse.
When all others ducked, Housecalls examined all of the ins and ugly outs of the Melvin Levine case. And when the Bradley case broke, the readers of Housecalls read (over a month ago) what CBS (and their fancy Harvard expert) is just now telling you:
Of course, it does not surprise me AT ALL that Dr. Earl Bradley was apparently on the Delaware Medical Society's radar for at least five years (not to mention that of the state's Attorney General . . . who felt she could not win the case . . . ergo, children could just keep on getting fondled and raped), yet a-whole-lot-of-nothing was done to investigate/stop him.
The children could just "get over it".
It just demonstrates (once again) that the "White Wall" is very real, and that (if standing alone) doctors and nurses and office managers (in this case, Bradley's own sister) generally keep their heads down/eyes averted/mouths shut until they cannot anymore . . .
We know what happens to medical whistle-blowers. And we also know that NO ONE (despite all the EMPTY PC blather about transparency and accountability and ethics) really cares.
And given what we KNOW, WHY would ANYONE want to put themselves through what I've been through? In my own hometown . . .
. . . and on these *&^%$# blogs.
The system is beyond broken. But Ed Cone-of-the-Cones, John Robinson & company don't think that any these things are interconnected or relevant.
They've got that "code of silence" down pat.
I wonder if these citizens and journalists would change their tunes if their child was dying . . . or their daughter was raped in her doctor's office by one of the people on this planet that she's supposed to trust most.
