Looking at 2021 Through a Doctor’s Eyes

Looking at 2021 Through a Doctor’s Eyes

Al Ritter

I try to look at everything from both sides and the facts then form an opinion from there. Over the last two years that has become increasingly hard for me to do.

Never in my life have I heard that the science is settled and that’s all there is to it. Well I digress, we heard that constantly about climate change but that’s for another article.

What I am getting at in this article is why are some doctors so belligerent and aggressive about getting a vaccine and boosters while others seem indifferent about it?

I talked to a nurse friend last night and she shined some light on the subject for me. As she spoke I was beginning to see a pattern and what some doctors have in common where others don’t.

For Doctors, starting an individual practice takes money and lots of it! These brave souls are wandering into uncharted territory with no real promise of financial security. They almost always come carrying not on the financial burden of opening a practice, and hiring employees but also come with the financial burden of education debt sometimes amounting to $500,000. These same doctors also aren’t afforded much in the way of discounts on malpractice insurance, but they forge bravely forward on their own.

After all it’s the American dream right?

Now on the other hand you see a different doctor who somehow liked the “security” of internship feeling like they were part of something bigger and better. The Hospital lovingly wrapped their arms around this doctor and offered them even more of the perks that come with the security of being in a huge corporate conglomerate. They offer to pay off his education debt in exchange for something, they offer him the cloak of their corporate attorneys should the need arise, they offer him cheap malpractice insurance. They offer him internal Hospital offices at a discount rate. They offer him internal transcription services, and office personnel from the hospital employee pool.

The perks are many and they get easily taken in, not by Doctors with many more years’ experience than they do, but by a corporate entity, bean counters and Administrative Directors. Sure all hospitals have that one Doctor that is on the board of directors that appears to be the leader, but sadly they are usually doctors on the downhill side of their careers who don’t practice any longer but merely collect a salary.

If the patient wasn’t very savvy they would assume that a doctor in a clinic is devoid of these influences, well some are and some aren’t. Consider that most clinics today are backed by one hospital or another so that influence continues in that clinic.

Now that the doctor has accepted his bag of silver to work for the hospital, what is expected of him? I think in the last two years it’s become painfully obvious what is expected. Regiments of things begin to appear such as the standard coding that every patient gets whether he actually received that service or not, unnecessary testing and many others, all to pad the pockets of the hospital. Regardless of his personal experiences in treatment of his patients he has been handed a set of unspoken rules about not only the treatment he is allowed to give patients. He may NOT speak about anything publicly about those treatments that reflect his personal experience or opinions. If he does his reputation is threatened first off. Secondly his very existence as a hospital preferred doctor has now been questioned by the very same Administrators that offered him employment in the first place. God forbid he say or post anything on social media that doesn’t conform to the general guidelines his employers have handed him as script. Violate that and your career is over! The threats are real!

The carrot at the end of the stick to new doctors is very real and the corporate hospital entities have only one objective in mind and that is money. The new doctor might have had the Hippocratic Oath in mind as the left medical school but those lines get a tad blurred when they accept employment in the hospital.

Judas Iscariot treated Jesus in much the same way a Hospital Doctor is treating their patients, it’s sad but true. Once money enters into the picture somehow evil usually prevails.