Interesting. I’ve been confounded about why health care colleagues aren’t masking. Once we knew we could prevent respiratory illness it should be standard of care but I still not. I know medical training tends to enforce conformity but it’s been astonishing to me to see which of my colleagues refuse to mask up.
My neurologist wears one but I’m not sure if she always does or if she just wears it because I’m wearing one and she’s worried that I’m wearing it because I’m currently sick.
My PCP doesn’t wear one anymore, last time I was there I was telling him that the gynecology department at the hospital is requiring masks and I told him I thought it was super gross they were the only dept in the hospital that cares about patient’s health, but I guess I should be glad that someone cares about somebody. Then as I was checking out I saw him enter a room with a mask on.
I don’t know if it was me talking about nobody caring about people, or if the person he was seeing was actively sick, but it made me feel better to see it.
I am disabled by MECFS I got from mono 20 years ago, And when I’m in a doctors appointment with someone not wearing a mask telling me there’s nothing they can do for me I like to talk a lot of shit about people being so stupid and how they have no idea that a virus can do this and then doctors won’t be able to help them. And how pathetic it is that people having their whole face out at work is more important than their future ability to work.
But part of me thinks that they are just so sick of capitalism that they are fine with disabling themselves if that means they never have to go to work again.
Here in America people think that getting disability and food stamps are like winning the lottery I don’t think they realize we live in poverty and that most people lose EVERYTHING before the SSA will send them checks. But if they continue to f around they will find out.
Here in BC health care workers are discouraged from masking, and when masking was required they were only allowed to wear the flimsy blue masks. Even visitors were only allowed the blue masks, even when entering with a better N95 mask on. That's our Provincial Health Officer's work.
I remember when the hospital near me (NH, USA) Was trying to make people takeoff their respirators and put on the surgical masks. It was extra bizarre after they dropped mandatory masking they continued to try to do that.
I successfully argued against it by pointing out that they don’t need to worry about how clean my respirator is since there are people not wearing a mask at all breathing all over the place.
My mother was killed by unmasked medical staff who were TESTING HER FOR LUNG CANCER.
Which, miraculously she did not have after 70 years of chainsmoking, but she was dead in a week from Covid. Was she 83, frail, an alcoholic and chain smoker who made my life a trial for decades and was probably going to die of those conditions in the next few months? Yes. But as Jacqueline Rose discusses in her book The Plague, she was, as Freud described it, robbed of her own death. I'll never stop being pissed off about it.
That's really terrible. My dear friend was supporting a family member who acquired COVID while in hospice (!!!), because staff and visitors were not required to mask. I can't help thinking about the irony of the current controversy over MAID, when vulnerable patients continue to be hastened to their deaths by the sheer negligence of others. Where's the ethical consistency?
Good thought. I lived with 4 medical students in my early 20s and one of them was entirely unfit for the profession. I didn't realise at the time but looking back the guy was seriously troubled
That doesn't explain the racism and misogyny that's still rife in the medical community nor the number of psychopaths who work in the medical field because they want to play god.
My research used to focus solely on disrespect and abuse of people giving birth in healthcare facilities. I only wrote a few papers, but I receive a citation notification every single day.
If we had a functioning and actually JUST justice system, we could sue hospitals for the tiniest fraction of the deaths they have caused through abandoning infection control. We could bankrupt them. In a just world at the very least we could hold them accountable. But we have none of that.
my father was infected with Covid after three years of keeping himself safe at home, after he took a fall and had to be hospitalized. He was at that point in the early stages of dementia and was fully functioning. He never got to live at home again. After his Covid infection, his dementia rapidly accelerated, and he was moved around from institution to institution for the last year of his life, and he died in one of these miserable institutions too. Surrounded by people not masking.
It’s horrid that there is not more controversy or resistance in the medical workplace. I am by training an RN & worked throughout 2020 on covid units. Since then, I moved into hospice work where I was the only person in our company to wear a mask. Little to no staff in long term care facilities or nursing homes wore masks. I’ve left the institutions of healthcare because even before covid, I noticed the harm being done from lack of education for non-English speakers, power dynamics & lack of choice, & the blatant racism, sexism, transphobe that under-minded “care”. It seems to me that the institutions themselves are rooted in power dynamics that compromise ethical healthcare. Not to mention the vile historical implications of surgical & pharmaceutical “research”.
Appreciate this piece. Thank you for putting the time & energy into it. Inspired to write more from my experience with it.
I am in NH and I hadn’t heard of Dr. Todd until now, so thank you for that.
We did have a doctor Michael O’Connell who ran a chain of pill mills who used his practice to hunt for women to victimize. When Suboxone came out he was very excited that he could get patients addicted and then keep them while treating them for the addiction.
Then he hired a young woman fresh out of prison, started treating her with Suboxone, let her and her husband live on his property, then he seduced her and started having sex with her, gave her herpes, then he fired her and she sued him and blew up his whole scammy business (Hudson v O’Connell)
He was forced to give up his medical license but he was allowed to keep his pill mills because this state doesn’t require you to have a medical license to sell fentanyl I guess.
His PA, Chris Clough, did a few years in Massachusetts for being part of the Insys Fentanyl grift. Chris was prescribing more of that brand of fentanyl than every other provider in New Hampshire put together. And they were paying him to do speeches to cover up the kickbacks.
Oh AND back when there was that scandal of tainted steroids from a compounding pharmacy being sold and people getting meningitis and dying from it, he was the only provider in New Hampshire who purchased those dirty steroids to use in epidural steroid injections.
He was interviewed by a magazine and he explained that insurance companies pay a flat rate for those procedures so if he could save $20 on the steroids that was $20 more for him. In a different article earlier that year he reported that his business had a million dollars a month in revenue so he really didn’t need that $20. People died because of it.
And after all that O’Connell was still allowed to profit until he died last fall. When women were reporting him people didn’t believe them because “he’s a doctor he wouldn’t do that!”
Oh and I forgot to add that one of the lesser evil Democrats running for governor worked for him (Cinde Warmington) AND Congresswoman Jeane Shaheen is married to this scumbag’s defense attorney.
Women from the blue crew defending racist rapists. (O’Connell’s blog was GROSS)
Thank you for this article Nate - and for your voice and advocacy. It's so needed and I hope people read this and take it to heart ... we're in a very dark place... about to get darker and way too many people simply refuse to pay attention.
A small study showed that Hospital acquired COVID has an 10% mortality rate post vaccines.
Google “ incidence and outcome of hospital-acquired COVID-19 infections and secondary and tertiary care hospitals in the era of COVID-19 vaccinations.”
I have a young white female doc, probably on the early side of 30’s. She’s extremely knowledgeable and transparent about using AI for note taking, but never wears a mask (I’m in my 60’s). I always N95 in any medical setting. She asked me during my routine checkup if I’d like her to mask. I thought to myself, why bother when you will only put on a used surgical mask and I have an N95? But the point it, why aren’t these docs masking? My nephew is a PhD and MD who missed his graduation 2 years ago cause he was laid out with Covid for 2 weeks. I mean it affects them too! Mind boggling.
Also addiction is rampant in the medical profession. Smart people tend to think they can outsmart drugs. 🙄
I absolutely think why bother when they ask me if I would like them to wear a mask, like seriously y’all have been breathing all over this room for hours before I sat it, but yes, I would like you to wear a mask.
You need to say yes every time they ask that question even if it seems silly because they’re just going to throw it in the garbage in two minutes, they need to hear that this is important.
Plus, this is going to sound selfish, but if they get sick and die and we don’t have healthcare providers that’s going to be a huge problem. At the end of 2020 my mental healthcare provider’s boss died of Covid and the whole office closed forever because of it. She was able to open her own practice and I think she kept a lot of staff but it took them to reopen so her patients and his had nobody for a year or they had to scramble for a new provider.
So if they ask you if they should wear a mask please tell them yes please. Maybe if they hear it enough they’ll just do it. Maybe they won’t throw it in a landfill after wearing it for five minutes with you because the next patient will say the same thing.
I'm always tempted to lob the ball back to them by asking, "Why do you think you don't need to?" But it's nearly impossible to find a new doctor anymore so I keep mum.
When you constantly tell people in a profession that they are superior while rewarding them with a lot of money and the power to avoid the inhumanities of capitalism and the consequences of their own inhumane behaviors you get inhumane people in the field.
We stop this by self reflecting on how capitalism was founded on and rewards inhumanity and by having humane people uniting to form humane societies with HC that’s patient and community owned and no hierarchy- the belief HCWs have that they are superior is part of the problem
Abuses flourish wherever there is a power imbalance and the coercive power imbalance between patients and doctors and nurses is extreme.
I agree though there are troubling connections between eugenics and western medicine which go beyond Nazi Germany. In all colonial settings, doctors have been involved in racist experimentation, forced sterilisations etc including in Australia where I come from where such practices were widespread on Indigenous people.
I recently heard about the US Doctor Cornelius P Rhoads, who became reknown for later research on chemotherarpy, was exposed as a racist who confessed to expermimenting on Puerto Ricans (which was whitewashed)
Given what we know sleep deprivation does to the human brain courtesy of decades of sleep science, and given how much sleep the average HCW gets on a regular basis, not to mention how little they got during schooling and training.... and the system expects them to conduct surgeries, make split-second life or death decisions, prescribe medications, perform emergency trauma care. Along with being repeatedly infected an unknown number of times by a virus that damages vasculature body-wide and can cross the blood-brain barrier. Yeah, I'm going to go with "epic disaster".
In the US, many Doctors who actually care about their patients suffer for it because there’s so little they can do; they have very limited power due to the way insurance companies have tied their hands. Even before COVID, healthcare professionals were experiencing burnout at a higher rate than any other industry — and a pandemic didn’t make things any better.
Interesting. I’ve been confounded about why health care colleagues aren’t masking. Once we knew we could prevent respiratory illness it should be standard of care but I still not. I know medical training tends to enforce conformity but it’s been astonishing to me to see which of my colleagues refuse to mask up.
I'm obviously reluctant to make any generalisations but at some point you get drawn to some quite troubling conclusions
My neurologist wears one but I’m not sure if she always does or if she just wears it because I’m wearing one and she’s worried that I’m wearing it because I’m currently sick.
My PCP doesn’t wear one anymore, last time I was there I was telling him that the gynecology department at the hospital is requiring masks and I told him I thought it was super gross they were the only dept in the hospital that cares about patient’s health, but I guess I should be glad that someone cares about somebody. Then as I was checking out I saw him enter a room with a mask on.
I don’t know if it was me talking about nobody caring about people, or if the person he was seeing was actively sick, but it made me feel better to see it.
I am disabled by MECFS I got from mono 20 years ago, And when I’m in a doctors appointment with someone not wearing a mask telling me there’s nothing they can do for me I like to talk a lot of shit about people being so stupid and how they have no idea that a virus can do this and then doctors won’t be able to help them. And how pathetic it is that people having their whole face out at work is more important than their future ability to work.
But part of me thinks that they are just so sick of capitalism that they are fine with disabling themselves if that means they never have to go to work again.
Here in America people think that getting disability and food stamps are like winning the lottery I don’t think they realize we live in poverty and that most people lose EVERYTHING before the SSA will send them checks. But if they continue to f around they will find out.
Here in BC health care workers are discouraged from masking, and when masking was required they were only allowed to wear the flimsy blue masks. Even visitors were only allowed the blue masks, even when entering with a better N95 mask on. That's our Provincial Health Officer's work.
I remember when the hospital near me (NH, USA) Was trying to make people takeoff their respirators and put on the surgical masks. It was extra bizarre after they dropped mandatory masking they continued to try to do that.
I successfully argued against it by pointing out that they don’t need to worry about how clean my respirator is since there are people not wearing a mask at all breathing all over the place.
My mother was killed by unmasked medical staff who were TESTING HER FOR LUNG CANCER.
Which, miraculously she did not have after 70 years of chainsmoking, but she was dead in a week from Covid. Was she 83, frail, an alcoholic and chain smoker who made my life a trial for decades and was probably going to die of those conditions in the next few months? Yes. But as Jacqueline Rose discusses in her book The Plague, she was, as Freud described it, robbed of her own death. I'll never stop being pissed off about it.
Awful, I'm sorry
That's really terrible. My dear friend was supporting a family member who acquired COVID while in hospice (!!!), because staff and visitors were not required to mask. I can't help thinking about the irony of the current controversy over MAID, when vulnerable patients continue to be hastened to their deaths by the sheer negligence of others. Where's the ethical consistency?
Very hypothetical, but medical training is pretty cruel. Maybe doctors would be more ethical if they'd been treated decently.
Good thought. I lived with 4 medical students in my early 20s and one of them was entirely unfit for the profession. I didn't realise at the time but looking back the guy was seriously troubled
That's a different problem, but yes, the medical schools could do a better job of screening as well as offering better treatment.
That doesn't explain the racism and misogyny that's still rife in the medical community nor the number of psychopaths who work in the medical field because they want to play god.
No I don’t think they get a free pass on being abusive just because they were abused. That’s not how this works.
That isn't what I meant. The idea was that if the next round of students were treated well, they might be less abusive.
My research used to focus solely on disrespect and abuse of people giving birth in healthcare facilities. I only wrote a few papers, but I receive a citation notification every single day.
If we had a functioning and actually JUST justice system, we could sue hospitals for the tiniest fraction of the deaths they have caused through abandoning infection control. We could bankrupt them. In a just world at the very least we could hold them accountable. But we have none of that.
Thanks for your advocacy work.
my father was infected with Covid after three years of keeping himself safe at home, after he took a fall and had to be hospitalized. He was at that point in the early stages of dementia and was fully functioning. He never got to live at home again. After his Covid infection, his dementia rapidly accelerated, and he was moved around from institution to institution for the last year of his life, and he died in one of these miserable institutions too. Surrounded by people not masking.
Heartbreaking I'm sorry
thank you!
Doctors carry a lot of power. There seems to be a trend in this country of powerful individuals avoiding the consequences of their evil deeds…
It’s horrid that there is not more controversy or resistance in the medical workplace. I am by training an RN & worked throughout 2020 on covid units. Since then, I moved into hospice work where I was the only person in our company to wear a mask. Little to no staff in long term care facilities or nursing homes wore masks. I’ve left the institutions of healthcare because even before covid, I noticed the harm being done from lack of education for non-English speakers, power dynamics & lack of choice, & the blatant racism, sexism, transphobe that under-minded “care”. It seems to me that the institutions themselves are rooted in power dynamics that compromise ethical healthcare. Not to mention the vile historical implications of surgical & pharmaceutical “research”.
Appreciate this piece. Thank you for putting the time & energy into it. Inspired to write more from my experience with it.
I am in NH and I hadn’t heard of Dr. Todd until now, so thank you for that.
We did have a doctor Michael O’Connell who ran a chain of pill mills who used his practice to hunt for women to victimize. When Suboxone came out he was very excited that he could get patients addicted and then keep them while treating them for the addiction.
Then he hired a young woman fresh out of prison, started treating her with Suboxone, let her and her husband live on his property, then he seduced her and started having sex with her, gave her herpes, then he fired her and she sued him and blew up his whole scammy business (Hudson v O’Connell)
He was forced to give up his medical license but he was allowed to keep his pill mills because this state doesn’t require you to have a medical license to sell fentanyl I guess.
His PA, Chris Clough, did a few years in Massachusetts for being part of the Insys Fentanyl grift. Chris was prescribing more of that brand of fentanyl than every other provider in New Hampshire put together. And they were paying him to do speeches to cover up the kickbacks.
Oh AND back when there was that scandal of tainted steroids from a compounding pharmacy being sold and people getting meningitis and dying from it, he was the only provider in New Hampshire who purchased those dirty steroids to use in epidural steroid injections.
He was interviewed by a magazine and he explained that insurance companies pay a flat rate for those procedures so if he could save $20 on the steroids that was $20 more for him. In a different article earlier that year he reported that his business had a million dollars a month in revenue so he really didn’t need that $20. People died because of it.
And after all that O’Connell was still allowed to profit until he died last fall. When women were reporting him people didn’t believe them because “he’s a doctor he wouldn’t do that!”
Oh and I forgot to add that one of the lesser evil Democrats running for governor worked for him (Cinde Warmington) AND Congresswoman Jeane Shaheen is married to this scumbag’s defense attorney.
Women from the blue crew defending racist rapists. (O’Connell’s blog was GROSS)
Thank you for this article Nate - and for your voice and advocacy. It's so needed and I hope people read this and take it to heart ... we're in a very dark place... about to get darker and way too many people simply refuse to pay attention.
Thanks!
Anytime! Thank YOU for what you do!
A small study showed that Hospital acquired COVID has an 10% mortality rate post vaccines.
Google “ incidence and outcome of hospital-acquired COVID-19 infections and secondary and tertiary care hospitals in the era of COVID-19 vaccinations.”
I have a young white female doc, probably on the early side of 30’s. She’s extremely knowledgeable and transparent about using AI for note taking, but never wears a mask (I’m in my 60’s). I always N95 in any medical setting. She asked me during my routine checkup if I’d like her to mask. I thought to myself, why bother when you will only put on a used surgical mask and I have an N95? But the point it, why aren’t these docs masking? My nephew is a PhD and MD who missed his graduation 2 years ago cause he was laid out with Covid for 2 weeks. I mean it affects them too! Mind boggling.
Also addiction is rampant in the medical profession. Smart people tend to think they can outsmart drugs. 🙄
I absolutely think why bother when they ask me if I would like them to wear a mask, like seriously y’all have been breathing all over this room for hours before I sat it, but yes, I would like you to wear a mask.
You need to say yes every time they ask that question even if it seems silly because they’re just going to throw it in the garbage in two minutes, they need to hear that this is important.
Plus, this is going to sound selfish, but if they get sick and die and we don’t have healthcare providers that’s going to be a huge problem. At the end of 2020 my mental healthcare provider’s boss died of Covid and the whole office closed forever because of it. She was able to open her own practice and I think she kept a lot of staff but it took them to reopen so her patients and his had nobody for a year or they had to scramble for a new provider.
So if they ask you if they should wear a mask please tell them yes please. Maybe if they hear it enough they’ll just do it. Maybe they won’t throw it in a landfill after wearing it for five minutes with you because the next patient will say the same thing.
I'm always tempted to lob the ball back to them by asking, "Why do you think you don't need to?" But it's nearly impossible to find a new doctor anymore so I keep mum.
When you constantly tell people in a profession that they are superior while rewarding them with a lot of money and the power to avoid the inhumanities of capitalism and the consequences of their own inhumane behaviors you get inhumane people in the field.
We stop this by self reflecting on how capitalism was founded on and rewards inhumanity and by having humane people uniting to form humane societies with HC that’s patient and community owned and no hierarchy- the belief HCWs have that they are superior is part of the problem
Abuses flourish wherever there is a power imbalance and the coercive power imbalance between patients and doctors and nurses is extreme.
I agree though there are troubling connections between eugenics and western medicine which go beyond Nazi Germany. In all colonial settings, doctors have been involved in racist experimentation, forced sterilisations etc including in Australia where I come from where such practices were widespread on Indigenous people.
I recently heard about the US Doctor Cornelius P Rhoads, who became reknown for later research on chemotherarpy, was exposed as a racist who confessed to expermimenting on Puerto Ricans (which was whitewashed)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_P._Rhoads
"How do you make healthcare a less attractive profession to psychopaths?"
I think it more important to decrease their number (perhaps even through health care) regardless of their career paths.
Given what we know sleep deprivation does to the human brain courtesy of decades of sleep science, and given how much sleep the average HCW gets on a regular basis, not to mention how little they got during schooling and training.... and the system expects them to conduct surgeries, make split-second life or death decisions, prescribe medications, perform emergency trauma care. Along with being repeatedly infected an unknown number of times by a virus that damages vasculature body-wide and can cross the blood-brain barrier. Yeah, I'm going to go with "epic disaster".
In the US, many Doctors who actually care about their patients suffer for it because there’s so little they can do; they have very limited power due to the way insurance companies have tied their hands. Even before COVID, healthcare professionals were experiencing burnout at a higher rate than any other industry — and a pandemic didn’t make things any better.