This happened near Los Angeles in a county run hospital. Bear in mind that white people are a minority in this area. So these doctors decided they were going to do a surgery on a low income woman and implant her with an experimental medical device. The medical device company was generously paying these doctors. The thing was that this was a medically unnecessary surgery. It was purely about experimentation and money. The low income woman patient probably knew what was happening and was probably getting paid, or might have been told that her expensive medical bills would be paid if she agreed to this procedure. So the doctors bring in this other doctor to help be there and provide assistance during the procedure, this is a middle aged white guy. The doctor does a little bit of digging and realizes that this surgery they are going to do is unnecessary. He spoke his mind to them and refused to take part. They went ahead and did the surgery anyway. Something went wrong, the patient suffered a stroke as a result, and now the patient has difficulty communicating, either verbally or by writing. This doctor then went to the hospital administration to complain. The administration did nothing. Rather, the other doctors teamed up against him and made his job a hell, and finally got him fired. Why would the doctors gang up against him? There could be three reasons. It was revenge for him snitching on them and trying to get them in trouble. This might not have been the only unnecessary experimental surgery they were performing and they wanted him out of there so they could continue the lucrative practice, getting extra money on the side without anyone blowing the whistle. Then they also might have been ganging up against the white guy. Kind of tribalistic, "protecting their territory". This is speculative but there also may have been cultural differences. This white guy came from an old school American culture of ethics and standing up for the right thing. These other doctors came from a Hispanic and Vietnamese culture of corruption. They found a way to bring in lots of extra money on the side, why should they let this white guy and his ethics ruin that for them? The doctors were Hispanic and Vietnamese, but were being led by one senior White doctor. That White doctor was probably opportunistic, he knew it would be easy to get those other doctors to engage in something unethical because they didn't have American-style ethical principles. The hospital administrators were probably in on it too and getting kick-backs from the medical device company. Dr. Timothy Ryan filed a lawsuit about retaliatory firing for exposing wrongdoing against patients. Fired Physician Wins $2.1 Million in Retaliation Suit Against LA County | KFI AM 640 (iheart.com) It's unclear how much the patients knew about how unnecessary the surgeries were. It sounds like the doctors were giving low income patients financial incentives to consent to procedures. But they were still medically unnecessary and thus probably unethical. Paid guinea pigs. How much do you want to bet the patients being experimented upon were illegal immigrants. That area is full of them, and the county government does everything it can to hide them from Immigration authorities. Did anyone see the film The Constant Gardener (2005)? The plot is about an international pharmaceutical company secretly carrying out its testing of an experimental drug in Africa. They try to kill the couple to prevent them from escaping and revealing what is going on to the outside world.
Hey, I've been subjected to so many MRI's, CAT scans, pancreatic resections and the like it's not even funny any more.
