Do you trust your doctor? Personally, when I go for a checkup, I have to wait around for an hour so I can shake his hand, answer a few questions, then leave. Since I’ve been lucky enough to not need any serious medical attention, I really couldn’t say how much I trust my doctor. Many people, especially in smaller towns with limited healthcare options, see the same physician for years. If I had a personal relationship with a doctor, I’m not sure how often I would try to get a second opinion on some diagnosis or ask anyone else to do the procedure.
Then there are cases like Dr. Arvind Gandhi’s.
In Munster, Indiana, the state Medicaid program started an investigation into claims that he, alongside two other doctors in his practice, performed unnecessary cardiac procedures. It seems likely he and his partners were trying to profit off of these procedures as they received the most Medicare reimbursements of any other cardiologists in the state, according to the New York Times.
This problem of performing unnecessary procedures on patients is not limited to smaller practices. The New York Times wrote that at the Ashland Hospital Corporation, “a hospital system in eastern Kentucky paid nearly $41 million to settle allegations” in 2014, “doctors falsified patient records to justify” installing coronary stents and catheters.
These cases are obviously malpractice. So how are schools like IU and other colleges educating our future medical professionals on how to avoid it or how to report it?
I decided to do some research of my own and discovered that to get a bachelor of science in biology or chemistry at IU it is not required to take a professional ethics class nor is it required to take the MCAT, a test similar to the SAT/ACT students must take in order to be admitted into a medical school.
Now, the actual IU School of Medicine does require ethics courses, but how do doctors and students really behave when they work in their own practice with societal pressures that value financial gain more than anything else? I think this case draws interesting parallels to the Milgram experiment.
Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, set up a series of tests to examine how much pain the subjects were willing to inflict on their fellow students, given that they were told to do so. Nearly two-thirds of the participants were willing to turn the dial — which caused no actual pain — all the way up.
As compassionate human beings, we are often horrified by cases such as Dr. Gandhi’s. We fail to understand how people could do the things they did and make the perpetrators out to be less than human. However, most humans are significantly more morally righteous than we actually deserve to be. Though this man’s actions are indefensible, they speak to larger societal issues that drive us to make as much money as possible to be successful, motivations that can potentially drive us to madness.
mccinkos@indiana.edu
@matthewcinkoske
