Eleven years of cancer treatment for cancer the patient never had
A doctor treating a patient for cancer they didn’t have...for eleven years. This Shkreli award winner put patients through years of cancer treatments, destroying their physical, mental, and financial well-being.
After becoming the highest paid physician at his hospital, his alleged assaults on patients came to light:
- When one patient died, “the medical examiner found no sign of cancer, leaving a drug used for chemotherapy as the likely cause of death.”
- “Weiner provided disturbingly high doses of barbiturates to facilitate death in seriously ill patients, when those patients may not have actually been close to death.”
- He allegedly “altered end of life plans without consulting patients, prescribed high doses of opioids to patients that did not need them, and often failed to document his work.”
Marty Makary M.D., M.P.H., in his book “Unaccountable” talks about how other doctors and nurses know who the good doctors are, and conversely, who the bad doctors are.
Doctors who treat patients for cancer when the patient doesn’t have cancer are bad doctors.
And, as Makary says through his book, other doctors often won’t speak out about the bad doctors in their own organizations.
That had to be happening here too, for at least some part of the decade he was hurting patients.
It’s all so appalling.
I’m not going to make a policy argument today. This isn’t a failure to be attributed to all doctors generally.
Read Makary’s book. Be good people. Make good choices.
Originally posted on LinkedIn, where the discussion and source links live in the comments.