There's a
petition going around regarding Dr. Ann Neuhas's, a colleague of the
late Dr. Tiller, medical license having been revoked. The
only article I can find from an actual news source is Fox, which is notorious for getting a
US Court of Appeals to rule that news organizations can lie and falsify. The
revocation order itself states:
"..failing
to adhere to the appropriate standard of care in the treatment of
patients, and failing to make and maintain adequate patient medical
records."
Let's tackle the easy portion first:
medical records. Having worked in health care, charting is rushed
through 9 times out of 10. Providing care comes first and foremost, and
detailed record keeping, while important, can take hours at the end of
an already long day. I have known people to develop grudges against
nurses, and get them in trouble, if not have their licenses revoked
entirely, for charting issues. (Mind you, my experience was in the
States, where this dispute took place). Now bear in mind that she was
heavily watched by anti-choicers. For years. Now imagine if every
paperwork mistake that you've made at work in the past three years was
brought before a panel of your peers. In short, if you want to get
someone in the medical field in trouble, go through their records with a
finetooth comb and you will inevitably find something that doesn't fly
with the Board of Medicine. Considering the Kansas attorney general's
office began to single out abortion providers, including Dr. Tiller,
perhaps Neuhaus was correct in maintaining her patients privacy since
this is the same state that brought us
Operation Rescue.
The
deviation from standard of care means that her records and procedures
were examined by fellow doctors, who found them to be lacking. As Fox
puts it, "she performed inadequate mental health exams on young patients
she then referred to Dr. George Tiller for late-term abortions." In
other words, she used a computer program designed to help diagnose,
which the judge found to be an inadequate tool (allegedly being five
pages or less) and her judgment to be faulty. Again drawing on my
experiences, short and succinct questionnaires are common-place in the
medical field, unless being seen by a specialist for an in-depth
psychological evaluation. It is not unusual for someone diagnosed with
Major Depressive Disorder to answer five questions by ticking "yes" or
"no" boxes followed by a short conversation when being seen for a
medication check. (Ten years ago it wasn't unusual for a person to go
to their primary care physician with complaints of depression, only to
be handed a prescription for anti-depressants and told to come back in
two weeks).
The part of the ruling that does concern me is the
alleged lack of aftercare. While the judge and board (practitioners of
law, not medicine) determined hospitalization to be necessary in some
cases, remember that all 11 cases reviewed involved patients between the
ages of 10 and 18. Institutionalizing a young girl who recently had an
abortion is going to compound the trauma, rather than therapeutic.
That's not to say that hospitalization is the only option, it seems to
be the only one under consideration in this hearing. But there is no
way of knowing what methods were used without seeing the case files.
Then again, some of these girls could have been claiming suicidal
ideation for any number of reasons that had nothing to do with true
mental health problems.
In conclusion, I am inclined to believe
that these are trumped up allegations. There are certainly people who
are out to prevent abortions at any cost, even for under-age girls who
are victims of incest, that getting one practitioner who provides second
opinions out of the medical field is not too petty for them. After
all, murder wasn't.
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