My post about the midwifery legal guide that recommends lying to your patients was picked up by Lindsay Beyerstein at In These Times, who pointed out:.
No witnesses” is a motto for a hitman, not a health care provider.
Elizabeth Camp the midwife who recommended lying responded, explaining that she had a good reason to lie: she was protecting herself!
She was charged for using medications that she was not licensed to use and which she had obtained illegally.
[T]he witnesses against me were the mothers who’s baby or life I had saved AND my own apprentice who was also my best friend at the time… Through my experience of facing up to 20 years in prison for hurting no one, I learned that a midwife can trust no one to protect her…
After my prosecution, I often told clients, up front, that if I had to do anything illegal to save them or their babies, that I would hide it from them. That way they could honestly say to the investigator, “I saw nothing.”
Imagine that! You can’t trust your clients or friends to protect you from prosecution for breaking the law. I wonder if other criminals know this and are equally outraged.
And, anyway, Elizabeth wasn’t recommending really lying to her patients:
Don’t you think they would know, when I asked them to turn off their cameras and turn their backs, what I was doing? Of course they would know that you don’t inject “minerals” to stop a hemorrhage, they aren’t stupid, but they can’t testify of something that they “assume.” How sad it was then, that I felt I had to play the same game that Doctors do in order to avoid prosecution.
How about really lying to everyone else and falsifying medical charts? Apparently she still recommends that.
But, hey, everyone else does it.
Yes, Doctor Amy, this is the same game YOU and your colleagues play, I know, because I sat right next to some of you in nursing and medical classes in college. I was taught, right along side nursing and medical students, how to avoid lawsuits, how to hide things from patients that they could later use against you.
Ummm, Elizabeth, there are no medical classes in college and I doubt you sat in on medical school, so clearly you are lying about that, too.
I’m not aware of any medical school, hospital or malpractice insurer that advises lying to patients. In fact, they advise exactly the opposite: Never lie to patients. Apologize for errors, Never, ever, ever falsify charts.
Elizabeth claims:
I have never lied to my clients but instead they helped ME play the game in their behalf, because they were also victims …
Isn’t that what the trainers and coaches and nutritionists do when they give athletes steroid injections and tell that that they are “supplements”?
Elizabeth is glad that the laws in her state have changed.
The “lying game” is no longer necessary and for that, I am grateful, for I detest it! That is precisely the reason I became a midwife instead of a doctor.
Please, Elizabeth, you didn’t even have the intellectual chops and wouldn’t do the work to become a real midwife, let alone a doctor.
Here’s newsflash for you Elizabeth:
No one forced you to do anything. No one forced you to become a poorly educated, poorly trained pretend “midwife.” No one forced you to attend homebirths where you KNEW emergencies might occur (that’s why you carried the drugs in the first place). No one forced you to obtain medications illegally. You, like anyone else who breaks the law is not forced to break the law; you CHOSE to break the law and then you CHOSE to counsel other self-proclaimed “midwives” to do the same thing AND lie about it, too.
Oh, and Elizabeth, we had already figured out that lied only to protect yourself. You didn’t need to explain that. That’s the most common reason why people lie, to benefit themselves. And you know what? It doesn’t justify lying or excuse it and it certainly doesn’t justify recommending that others lie just like you.
