Review of Dr. Death on Peacock

Upon review of the eight episodes of Dr. Death, about the failings of a spine surgeon and the terrible consequences of his poor practice of spine surgery, I have several comments.

It is sad that each hospital administration used him to make money, as the mention of 2-4 million dollars per year for a neurosurgeon working a hospital under the salary and the control of the administrators. It is unfortunate the employment of a physician such as that subrogates the physician to the will of the administrators as far as ancillary billing and surgeries that are questionable at best. This employment removes the gatekeeper status of the physician to a point to where he is doing obligatory surgeries and allowing the hospital to charge. When something goes wrong, as was evident in this eight-part series, the administrators at Baylor, Dallas Medical and everything basically just never really dealt with it, and it fell below the standards reporting to the national databank, and it just compounded from thereon; therefore, after three or four institutions it became apparent by the two physicians in Dr. Death, represented by Christian Slater and Alec Baldwin, that there was something wrong and the physicians took it upon themselves to do something about it. As it ended up, the only thing that could really be prosecuted was elder abuse, which was a fine point within the law. Therefore, he ended up in Federal Prison for life and out of the mainstream of patient care, which he had betrayed.

My video, made two years ago called License to Harm essentially predicted this because all the parameters were set up to allow something like this to happen, and especially in an individual who had very poor scruples and very little boundaries and was more interested in generating surgeries and money than quality healthcare. It goes back to income versus outcome and the income was more important than the outcome.

I mentioned in License to Harm that training programs, and I think the training program at the University of Tennessee as portrayed in the eight-part series Dr. Death, basically did not uncover the deceitfulness of that one neurosurgeon, and it was covered up by the administration at the University of Tennessee because of an alleged scientific breakthrough with stem cells and all sorts of smoke and mirrors, for which he apparently was passed and had the boxes checked as far as competence, but in fact did not. This led to horrible results, including him operating on his best friend, rendering him quadriplegic, and I frankly was very depressed when the eight-part series was over. To me, it was a travesty that this even happened, but it allows the constraints of medicine to be put in the hands of administrators and profiteering individuals and not in the medical establishment.

The one scene that was disturbing was the presentation by the characters of Alec Baldwin and Christian Slater in front of the Medical Board and how they seemed to be able to dismiss the transgressions for a lot of legal reasons or suppositions, which had not been totally proven, and that was a real dilemma all the way around. I have to say that this is still going on today, maybe not deaths, but unnecessary surgeries, and surgeons being more predator technicians than acting as real doctors. I think the very interesting part of the whole thing is listening to the character played by Alec Baldwin go through the Hippocratic Oath, first do no harm, and then he went down the line multiple levels to describe the oath that we should be practicing medicine by.