Baton Rouge General Lawsuit

Source: Health Care Renewal Blog  

My own medical internship was needlessly abusive in terms of sleep deprivation, treatment of interns as chattel by the Chief and some particularly nasty attendings, and the behaviors of some residents who were determined to return the hazing they'd received to the new intern 'plebes.' The abuses ultimately led to high levels of risk to patients. I wrote about my training experiences in my Sept. 2007 post "Metric myopia: does reducing exploitation of medical trainees have 'little effect' on patients?" [1]

However, in those days medical trainees were generally helpless to do anything about it. Most sucked the abuse up without complaining. In some cases they became victims of a form of the Stockholm Syndrome.

(In my case, I picked up and left the hospital after the PGY-1 internship year and went to other hospitals to complete my residency which were, at the time, of better quality and far less abusive. The jarring PGY-1 experience in part informs my writing on healthcare abuses in general at this blog. The original hospital went bankrupt a few years ago; this was no surprise to me.)

At HC Renewal, the posts on "physician learned helplessness" such as here and here in part focus on the effects of postgraduate medical training abuses.

So, whatever the truth and ultimate outcome, you at least have to admire this Resident (or, I should say, ex-Resident), who both sued and put up his own website about the suit, for his tenacity:

Details of the issues are at the website. They focus on Dr. Amer's whistleblowing about violations of the 80-hour-per-week rule instituted after the Libby Zion affair (the "Libby Zion law"), retaliation for complaints about the violations, psychological abuses of the trainees that sound all too familiar, and patient care risks (e.g., as detailed in this long page).

The Complaint docket is available in PDF at this link: Eid Amer, MD vs. Baton Rouge General Medical Center, General Health System, Tulane Univ. School of Medicine, and a host of individual plaintiffs.

This is certainly speaking out against the ingrained abuses of the medical training system.

I cannot comment on the merits of this case, but can say from my own personal experience, and that of many colleagues, that the claims are certainly plausible.

I wish this doctor luck. He will need it.

-- SS

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