Doctors, Not Administrators, Should Be Treating Patients

Physicians routinely treated patients based on our best clinical judgment.

Politics have corrupted the practice of medicine, and today hospitals tie physicians' hands while their patients needlessly suffer and die.

Patients at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital where I work are dying because they are unjustifiably and unlawfully being denied safe and effective treatments that their attending physician determines to be medically appropriate.

As a physician scientist, I have tried and tested new methods to fill gaps in our ability to treat patients and have established protocols based on what works.

Sentara's prohibition is indefensible regardless, as the hospital routinely permits its attending physicians to prescribe many drugs for uses that have not been validated through RCTs. In fact, such a basis for categorically prohibiting the use of FDA-approved drugs that an attending physician deems medically appropriate is virtually unheard-of in American medicine and establishes a dangerous precedent.

The law is based on a core principle of American medical law and practice, recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court and hospitals all over the country, that patients' "Right to receive medical care in accordance with [their] licensed physician's best judgment and the physician's right to administer it" are not to be overridden by "Unduly restrictive" hospital oversight committees.

We must take these life and death decisions out of the hands of politicized administrators and place them where they belong, with the patients who bravely face the worst and the physicians who care for them.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/22/doctors-not-administrators-should-be-treating-patients/