But this past Sunday's Housecalls post was featured on this week's edition of the medical blogosphere's Grand Rounds . . . styled (by Dr. Emer) in this fashion: Here's a lengthy, lengthy, lengthy post on a medical oversight case in North Carolina. Did I say it's a long post? Dr. Mary Johnson also gives us a fair warning, but do not let that discourage you. It is a strongly assertive post on the clash of medicine and the law.
What can I say? It's so refreshing after five years of the abuse and/or indifference dished out by Mr. Cone & our local so-called journalists.
Meanwhile, (remembering the parent phone-call from HELL) the Pediatric Insider hits one out of the park. And this morning, DRUDGE is featuring a Wall Street Journal article offering yet another ominous warning to the country: Very shortly, the United States is going to be 150,000 doctors down.
Well yeah, DUH. We were NEVER exactly "a dime a dozen", eh?
So maybe YOU Ed, maybe YOU JR, maybe YOU Diane, need to can the excuses. Maybe ordinary citizens need to be enlightened as to what has been going on right under their noses FOR YEARS . . . maybe, just maybe, third-rate, lying suits should not find it quite so easy to drive good doctors out of their mill towns . . . and maybe, just maybe, North Carolina officials and/or oversight agencies should STOP taking things for granted that should NEVER have been taken for granted in the first place?
And now, a demonstration of why Housecalls will remain at half-mast:
Friends have lately joked that there are parallels to be made between Mary Johnson's efforts/approach to educate a largely-kept-in-the-dark public about what has really been going on locally in medicine, and Julia Sugarbaker's to set straight an ignorant beauty queen:
"I'm sorry I didn't know."
"Well, now you do."
The question is, what do YOU do about it?
4/14 Update:
The Greensboro N&R continues to post self-serving NC Medical Board press releases as "news". And I've had all I can take of the soundbites that don't begin to tell the real story.
It shows in the comments I posted.
