Growing up I was taught to look up to and view doctors as close to infallible, certainly to be admired and respected. I'm not sure that I made any distinction in my own mind between various types of doctors or their specialties. As I've said many times, as a Baby Bad Lawyer, I ended up with a bunch of ambulance chasers and a more cynical crew you can not conjure--they disabused me quickly of this notion. These lawyers knew doctors like Tiger Woods knows cocktail waitresses. Epiphanies about the medical professionals were around every corner as I learned my profession.
From the outset of my career medical reports were thrust into my hands, I was patted on my head and sent to court with the client, Joe Flabeetz--with the instruction to bring money back to the office. Since medicine was not taught at the law school, my first task was simply to learn how to read these reports out loud without too much embarassment; learn how to pronounce: myofascitis, spondylolithesis, radiculopathy, and on and on, until these words would trip off my tongue as if I knew what any of it meant. Slowly I began to figure out what this language meant and calculate the import for our clients and telephone bills. Along the way I took classes and learned a little bit about anatomy and injury. Eventually, I began to depose doctors and in preparation for depositions I'd immerse myself in medical textbooks, I'd talk to experienced personal injury attorneys, and eventually I learned how to talk to the occasional expert/doctor we would hire. For the most part the kind of doctor we had working for us, well, let me put it this way--you didn't want to send your mom to him.
I suppose it makes sense before I go on, to issue a disclaimer--most physicians are NOT whore doctors. And a distinction: Whore Doctors are usually Bad Experts (a topic for another post), but not synonymous. In point of fact the Whore Doctor is supposed to be a Good Expert--that is believable and persuasive. As a Whore Doctor might say, "I'm a patient advocate." But can you imagine a Whore Doctor who is also a Bad Expert? uh, huh, you bet! A doctor who takes money from the lawyer, puely, to write a report and, or be a witness and is lousy at it--oh, trust me, poke beneath the veneer of most Whore Doctors and the Bad Expert is lurking. Some Whore Doctors are laughably Bad Experts--that any lawyer hires these slimeballs, or having received and reviewed their written reports continues to submit the material and proceed to court with this stuff as their evidence is scandalous on the lawyers. part.
As I've talked, here before, workers' compensation hearings in Our State can result in awards of thousands of dollars for relatively minor injuries based on a percentage of permanent partial impairment. As a result of so much money flowing around, it's a little like being in a "gentlemen's club" with a large roll of dead presidents--the whore doctors circle around like lap dancers looking for a $20 in the garter.
This amount of compensation awarded "injured workeers" is determined by what the doctor says in his or her report. When I first started doing workers' compensaton representation, there was no objective standards by which the industrial administrative court made its decision. My eyes were opened one afternoon when I was watching hearings where percentage awards were made--a specific whore doctor said so-and-so's injury was worth 7% not two minutes later the same doctor said another guy's injury, the identical injury with identical findings was worth 25%! The only difference that I could discern was that the second guy was represented by the local BIG FIRM that could pay the big bucks to the whore doctor.
Eventually reforms reigned in the workers' compensation system, here in Our State with the adoption of the AMA Guides to Disability--still what happens in this system is a-m-a-z-i-n-g. Gratuities, gifts, cocktails, and meals were/are the order of the day. In days of yore there was an older woman connected to the scheduling of medical exams and hearings at the workers compensation court--who was remarkable because her invaluable services in greasing the machinery could make the difference in a firm's bottomline--not surprisingly, she was the gratuity queen. Need Rolling Stone tickets for a sold out show, you could buy them from Ceil', you might even be able to choose your section. She was the house Madame--on Our State payroll.
Among the private Whore Doctors there's a board certified ophthalmologist (a medical doctor specializing in diseases of the eyes) who runs offices in all areas throughout Our Home State treating orthopedic and soft tissue injuries--you know, the eyes are connected to the head bone and the head bone is connected to the cervical spine and so on. There's an OB-Gyn who operates a pain clinic for men and women. One whore doctor I know resides abroad at his villa in France while his son, an adopted Korean kid (who was never able to pass the "foreign medical student examination," after his graduation from the medical school at the University of Guam)--ran the father's doctor's office submitting all of the provider information, especially the bills on forms his father had pre-signed, that is until the Medicare fraud authorities shut down the operation.
While I have not made a distinction you might think this is a problem for the plaintiff personal injury bar, alone,hardly, the whore doctors on the defense side are equally offensive, if slightly better compensated. I once took the deposition of a well known "defense" orthopedist whose book lined office had not one discernible medical text--his library consisted of Moody and Dun & Bradstreet investment guides. There's the "B-reader" a specially "qualified" radiologist certified to interpret x-rays for persons with exposure to asbestos who saw 400 hundred retired steelworkers on a Father's Day visit to see his Dad. Retired steelworkers lined up and filed through a trailer set up for him by a personal injury firm, in one door--asbestos claim out the other door, supper with the old man and on to the next town. I could go on and on with examples of greed, rapacity, shoddiness, and utter malpractice--it was and is endless.
Among the Whore Doctors the chiropractors are the most outrageous. Read the Wikipedia entry to get a sense of how truly strange "a calling" chiropractic is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic It would be one thing if Chiropractors saw themselves as providing some sort of purely therapeutic service that was allied to medicine, but truly these men and women think otherwise. You'd think--okay here's a group of peole not smart enough to get admitted into medical school, as a group they'll be humble, right? WRONG. Chiropractors are arrogant high-level quacks and they cover their professional tracks with an argot which they use in all seriousness that is inherently absurd and anti-empirical. Until recently Chiropractic was the only area of "medicine" where you could call yourself "doctor" and possess neither a high school or college degree. Chiropractors don't hesitate to offer their opinions on all sorts of ailments having nothing to do with their so-called expertise--the spinal column. I can't tell you how many times I've encountered chiropractic reports being offered on conditions like knee sprains, carpal tunnel, dermatological, and viral ailments as if these opinions constituted relevant expert opinion. Shameless whores.When I talk about chiropractic, friends tell me their stories of this person or that person who was helped by a chiropractor. I'm sure this happens, likewise I'm guessing that massage, or exercise or rest would have achieved the same result--but, I know of horrifying instances wheere these clowns "adjust," manipulate and crack spines in the presence of herniated discs, and other dangerous arthritic and neurological processes. Chiropractors can be dangerous quacks. Oh and a word about podiatrists, what college educated young man or woman says to his/herself--I want to be a foot doctor? I will say this for podiatry versus chiropractic--most podiatrists I've met seemed to have something close to relevant medical expertise in their discipline.
When I was a Baby Bad Lawyer in the offices of my ambulance chasing senior colleagues, the chiropractors, and the doctors would come around with lunch and cookie trays, bottles of booze, they would throw elaborate parties and give away appliances as door prizes--it was disturbing. Honestly, even as a youngster, I refused to indulge in this largess--it smelled then and to tell the truth so much of the institutional corruption in this profession flows through this tainted medicine and science.
I tell myself that I could have made a great living in this sea of sharks, but my dorsal fin didn't grow in early enough or quite in the way it needed to, how I needed it to,--to enable me to gleefully feed on the red meat with the required gusto and zeal. Maybe it was my false sense of sanitation, I needed to shower way too often after dealing with these sleazoids. The only thing worse than Whore Doctors--well, there are, let's see.....mmmmmm, lawyers.
Posts
