"Eat What You Kill"
propublica.org
"Eat What You Kill"
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Re: "Eat What You Kill"
#2[deleted]
Re: "Eat What You Kill"
#3This is one of the most horrifying articles I've read, and I somewhat wish I didn't read it.
I understand why it was posted here, and deserves upvotes.
There are bits I wanted to quote for comments but I genuinely believe it's better to read the article and let those parts meet you in the place and how the journalist wrote them.
Re: "Eat What You Kill"
#4There's so much here that it's hard to comment.
Ultimately it seems like a story of a doctor's cult of personality, greed and buying loyalty, reckless malpractice, and a failure of multiple institutions to detect it or care about stopping it.
Re: "Eat What You Kill"
#5> the more patient visits and treatments a doctor bills to insurance, the more that doctor and the hospital earn. Weiner described this system, which is common in American medicine, as “eat what you kill.”
This is often what people are scared about with US doctors, that the financial incentive will have them over-prescribe and tell you that treatments are needed that aren't.
Crazy Story!
Edit: I think one conclusion to take away, always get a second opinion, don't rely on just a single doctor/hospital's diagnosis.
Re: "Eat What You Kill"
#6> the more patient visits and treatments a doctor bills to insurance, the more that doctor and the hospital earn. Weiner described this system, which is common in American medicine, as “eat what you kill.” This is often what people are scared about with US doctors, that the financial incentive will have them over-prescribe and tell you that treatments are needed that aren't. Crazy Story! Edit: I think one conclusion…
I don’t think this is a viable option anymore. Most new patients are scheduled 3-9 months out in my experience. It’s particularly bad trying to see a specialist (I’ve been trying to get a spinal consultation for 10 months now, and I still need one more approval before they will actually put me on the schedule.
Re: "Eat What You Kill"
#7(1) Among other things, this is an awful example of why documentation matters. So many people were taking this man on his word, and I'm sure if there'd been proper paper trails he would've been caught in even more lies, and hopefully much sooner.
(2) Given how high his diagnosis rates were, I wonder if any population-level studies have been inadvertently thrown off by the "high" cancer rates in Montana, or otherwise tried to explain them. From the outside it might've looked like there was some kind of cancer cluster when in reality this guy was just a liar.
(3) I recently heard a similar story, albeit on a much smaller scale, of a woman who was wrongfully diagnosed with HIV and got so sick from the side effects of anti-HIV medication (this was in the late 80s/early 90s when treatment was nearly as bad as the disease) that she was on the verge of dying. Thankfully she sought last-ditch treatment with a doctor who ran some bloodwork and discovered that she was HIV negative.
In that case, the false positive came from a health department employee who'd deliberately lied to her about the results. The employee lied because they wanted the woman to come to their church, where she'd miraculously be "cured" of HIV (and of being gay). But the woman only realized this in hindsight.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/123/high-cost-of-living/act...
Re: "Eat What You Kill"
#8Hard to know what to say to such an insane story. Just read it.
Re: "Eat What You Kill"
#9One of the scariest part of it all, is the mass support from the people of the town. How popular charismatic personalities can completely blind people from common sense and their ability to demand truth, and in turn, how that can hurt those wronged, and keep the truth hidden away.
Re: "Eat What You Kill"
#10An absolutely terrifying read.