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| Satellite view of the American Board of Pediatrics' 2.8-acre Pond |
Surely, US pediatricians need a 2.8 acre pond. Where else would they be able to sit and contemplate their past careers as academics as the sun sets slowly over the horizon? Everyone knows that when properly maintained, ponds provide a peaceful venue for a leisurely stroll or for the opportunity to toss a hook and bobber in search of a bluegill or large-mouth bass. No doubt these activities are critical pediatric health care quality and safety skills. Thanks to the leadership and "medical professionalism" portrayed by the ABP leadership over the past 30 years or so, all US pediatricians can feel proud to know that every bit of their $1200 "continuous MOC" fee is going to the support of this worthy landmark.
Surely pediatricians worldwide know about the pond they purchased, don't they?
Perhaps not.
Ponds, you see, don't typically make the internet websites of the American Board of Medical Specialties member boards or IRS Form 990 tax forms (except as "land and buildings"). Few would think of lands and buildings as including a pond, but for the American Board of Pediatrics, it does. In fact, their pond (picture) rests on a consortium of properties adjacent to 111 Silver Cedar Ct, Chapel Hill, NC that span over 9.3 acres and comprises two separate buildings (201 Silver Cedar Ct is also owned by the ABP). Unfortunately, it's hard to imagine how a pond adds to the safety or quality of pediatric care in the United States. Instead, we can only surmise that a pond is an important asset to the American Board of Pediatrics because it improves their property value and provides important tax revenues and political influence to the state of North Carolina and beyond.
And who better to pay for that pond and annual taxes than unsuspecting US pediatricians increasingly forced to comply with Maintenance of Certification?
No one was supposed to know that the first recorded deed of these properties coincided in time with the creation of Maintenance of Certification, 1986, according to North Carolina real estate records. No one was supposed to know that as President and Advisor to the American Board of Pediatrics, James A. Stockman, III, MD, earned $1,307,415 in Fiscal year 2012 before his retirement package of another $2.4 million kicked in the next year, either.
And let's not forget the many cars that pediatric diplomates helped Dr. Stockman purchase during his tenure at the ABP.
Here are Dr. Stockman's own words, published in Pediatric Annals:
Dr. Shulman: If you had not chosen medicine, which field would you have chosen?Life beyond academe indeed.
Dr. Stockman: I’d be a car salesman.
Dr. Shulman: I suppose that’s not a surprise. You are quite the collector of classic cars. Your wife once told me that during a 5-year period in Chicago you bought and sold 40 or 50 separate autos. And that was before eBay!
Dr. Stockman: Yes, my collection is very diverse. Among them are a ’56 Cadillac, a Sting Ray, a Triumph, and a twin turbo engine Porsche 911. I love driving them on all the country back roads here in North Carolina. There is life beyond academe!…
Especially when one considers that Maintenance of Certification (MOC) was Stockman's "most far-reaching achievement" of his 20-year career with the American Board of Pediatrics (according to the well-funded Illinois-based American Academy of Pediatrics that has an extensive lobbying presence on Capitol Hill).
-Wes
ReplyDeleteIsn't it obvious? They need it for their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucking_stool
That will get them uppity front line clinicians in line.
We need to investigate the AAP and ABPs connections to #PizzaGate
DeleteI truly despise these parasites. Perhaps a new administration can rid healthcare of these non sensical entities.
ReplyDeleteIt appears nothing is what it seems.
ReplyDeleteIs the greed of quality assurance bureaucrats hurting the delivery of healthcare in America?
ReplyDeleteMandated MOC for docs is part of that harm that results from the bureaucratic avarice and disconnect that professional politicians exhibit.
Politicians are good at talking nice sounding empty theories, yet their hypocrisy and lies bring us back to reality with a slap in the face. There is real pain when one realizes it is not just physicians but all of us who are betrayed.
It is all about the testing money, not quality, having little to do with physician or patient.
Egregious conflicts of interest exist over the future of MOC and certification testing.
There is an improper business relationship between ABIM employee A. Benjamin Mannes moonlighting with testing security and testing delivery companies. (Caveon and Kryterion)
Mannes is a self-serving double felon and has violated civil rights of reporters, physicians and has a violent history including impersonation of a police officer and illegal possession of firearms. Convictions can be found in Washington DC court records. Mannes is in charge of hundreds of thousands of ABIM/ABMS physician files globally.
A. Benjamin Mannes, double-felon ABIM director of investigations, Caveon/Kryterion managing director/consultant, and American Board of Pediatrics consultant.
http://arielbenjaminmannes.com/consultation/
David Foster of Caveon and Kryterion, American Board of Pediatrics consultant and partner of A. Benjamin Mannes.
https://abpedsfoundation.org/blog/speaker/david-foster/
Next Caveon/ABMS, Caveon/ABPeds, Caveon/ABIM will take over your lives
ReplyDeleteWatch this frightening video presentation given by a man without conscience or ethical principles. The CEO David Foster is Caveon's MR. AUTOMATION MAN. His job is to turn physicians into automatons paying into the ABMS/Caveon investment clubs.
Every physician should work to end MOC today or your life as you know it is over.
They will bleed you dry and they make you sign your legal rights away opening you to civil and criminal penalties.
Caveon is the company that helped send Atlanta teachers to prison on "racketeering" charges. "The sickest thing that happened in Atlanta."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0tH4jfvRHA
Fresh experimental docs right out of the testing box
ReplyDeleteConclusions: ABPeds Proctoring-Options-Summary
"Ultimately, it was felt that the ABP needed to decide on the purpose and format of the MOC exam prior to choosing the appropriate proctoring solution. If the purpose continues to be assessment of knowledge to provide assurance to the public, then some level of proctoring, either in a secure test center or online, remains necessary. But if the examination was determined to be more formative and continuous in its purpose and format, authentication without proctoring might be more appropriate. The group remained convinced, however, that secure testing centers are essential for administering the initial certification exam."
https://abpedsfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Proctoring-Options-Summary.pdf
ReplyDelete"Physicians are parched for data."
"Pearson is the vehicle that will take physicians to the data ocean."
This is the biggest bunch of bull shit I have ever seen at the ABPeds "Future of testing seminar."
These people at ABMS/Pearson are out of their minds playing damn money games while physicians are actually parched for time with their families not "data."
The last thing a physician wants is to do is be in the MOC automation line. Frisked and fingerprinted stuck in a "Pearson prison" or in front of a "Caveon spy camera with its wide-angled view" for the rest of their lives!
Here is my reaction to ABMS MOC scam/scandal and the surveillance/police state they have created.
ReplyDeleteThe entire upper echelons of the ABMS is comprised primarily of nouveau-elitists who have slowly become soft and ill-prepared for real medicine and maybe even real life. Many have become hardened and stopped feeling what they do to others. Many are no longer capable of independent reason.
This elitism may have just crept up on them over time, but the inability to see that MOC must end now is irresponsible and unconscionable. It is resolved to do just that by the AMA House of Delegates for goodness sake! But the ABMS steam roller and demand for money and time without proof that their services are actually needed just keeps rolling on and crushes whoever is in its path. This callousness and inability to bend is reprehensible. All history shows us what happens to people who cannot show malleability. They perish.
These elites at the ABMS medical boards have gone way beyond just 'winging it'. Their actions can no longer be seen as stupid and comical; it is a tragedy now. The leadership has passed well beyond the threshold of malfeasance with their thugs, bullies and teams of lawyers seeking ruin of vulnerable women physicians with many mouths to feed, and candidates without means to defend themselves. It is unbelievable and getting worse with every passing year that the same phony photo-op monsters remain in power.
The kind of negligence they now display is hurtful to themselves and medicine. Most of the main players have become painfully deceitful public frauds in search of easy money. The earth is in sorrow with the mess the ABMS has created. The ability for them to wake up and change has passed. The trust has been destroyed; for most informed physicians and patients the ABMS is a broken enterprise.
Many of the executives with their financial deal makers and lawyered-up risk managers are serious cheaters involved in conscious racketeering schemes. They flash their self-serving corporate plans in secret to each other and when we find out somehow the whole thing just boggles the imagination.
Many of these professional medical executives are politicians aligned with bad corporate actors and entrenched medical society oligarchs. At whatever level of involvement all are taking part in this heinous en-mass abuse of physicians and patients. It is public fraud.
Many of these "pseudo quality assurance folks" are just plain lost and deserve some mercy. Compassion. But many of them need to be driven out and held to account. Some of the most egregious offenders even belong in prison.
ABPeds Future of Testing talk given by Eric Holmboe. Watch it!
ReplyDeleteAfter a long career living in his head thinking internal medicine "was just a series of tradeoffs", Eric Holmboe dedicated himself to abusing commonsense science in the theoretical pursuit of surveilling and policing rank-and-file physicians.
Eric Holmboe, formerly with the ABIM and now working at the ACGME, said "no amount of testing will fix what is really wrong with physicians/medicine" referring to what is really wrong with physicians' knowledge deficiencies in the workplace.
Regarding Holmboe's employment at the ACGME and reasons for leaving the ABIM: some say this was a revolving door network hire by the ACGME due to his egregious wrongdoing against physicians, which was so damaging--not only to the vulnerable candidates/diplomates they pursued and persecuted--but Holmboe's presence working for the ABIM put the ABMS in a legally risky position. Personally, I believe Holmboe did not like what he had done or had become as he stepped outside his job description from the realm of theory into the trade-off world of taking action against physicians which was both immoral and illegal.
Watch the video on testing assessment with Eric Holmboe. Holmboe is a big part of what is wrong with medicine and the ABMS/ACGME.
Holmboe worked for the ABIM for several years conducting "ABIM testing research." He worked with Ms. Lipner and others producing biased/bogus studies justifying their big paydays and the ABMS MOC financial empire. Conflicts of interest have been pointed out as nullifying much of that wastage of physicians' fees. That is Holmboe and Lipner, et al's claim to the ABMS fame: doing nothing essential or useful and getting paid handsomely for it.
Holmboe will be best remembered for "going way outside his job description" in pursuit of physicians who attended Dr. Arora's courses over a period of 20 years in Christine Cassel's political witch hunt. Physicians should be well-informed about "Dr." Holmboe who acted like a wild henchman as part of the ABIM/ABMS policing/surveillance instrument slicing through physicians' civil liberties, privacy and due process. All these punishing blows for attending a board prep course that was approved of by his present organization ACGME and the ACCME at the time. It appeared to many to be a resurgence of McCarthy/Nixonian witch-hunting and blacklisting in the façade of a neo-liberal regime.
The ABIM's use of a nuclear bomb to take care of a task that only required an ABIM/ABMS clerk writing a simple standard letter and licking a stamp will go down in ABMS history as the single most stupid and heinous act against thousands of physicians. Unimaginable who these people are calling the shots. But, the ABIM's motivations for these violations, if clearly presented in a court of law with documentation fairly gathered, would put most of these politically and financially motivated "testing thugs" behind bars for a very long time. That is if we had a justice system that treated all equally and fairly under the law.
Many physicians rightfully named Holmboe, Cassel, Langdon, and Baron as defendants in lawsuits involving these violations and abuses.
https://abpedsfoundation.org/fotc-2015/#videos
Anonymous
ReplyDeleteIt is such a shame that physicians are so complacent and dont stand up now and stop this abuse. The case of abim vs Salas a young man a young doctor fighting against a monster using our money... and we are allowing this.. we need to stop this now not tomorrow!!!!
If we all just say no .. stop paying .. abim will drown..-abms will drown...act now!!
Support dr salas and dr wes...they are doctors fighting, standing up to this abuse!!!
We are more... we have the power in group.. lets unite and fight!!!
It is really monstrous. So immoral. We agree. The ABMS and ABIM work in tandem. One should remember that whatever they say to deny their intimate crimes, they are sewn together in a pillow case stuffed full of illicit MOC money.
ReplyDeleteThe ABIM/ABMS knows what they have done and how utterly unethical it all is.
But Baron, Langdon, and Cassel ignored being hemmed in by morality and what is lawful. They played the razor's edge with lawyers and risk managers. They used the media like they and their partners owned the press.
Below is Dr. Salas Rushford's site. He was a first responder to the Haiti earthquake disaster. Read his pages. He has been a fighter from med school and residency. Many of the court cases involving the ABIM show who they really are. "Monsters" fits them well.
But they seem nice. Just like Lynn Langdon with her nearly $300,000 dollar bonus in 2012 after she maliciously persecuted thousands of physicians.
Maybe that bonus money was supposed to be for keeping her mouth shut.
Nobody in the history of the ABMS ever got such a sum as a 'bonus'. It is more likely Lynn had to pay for some of their dirty contract thugs and Christine Cassel and Rich Baron did not know how to expense it. They thought nobody would ever find out Langdon and the COO's office was in charge of her hired convict, Mannes as director of investigations, and his "dirty tricks team".
Now Langdon is most likely a boat that will never reach port.
Lynn Langdon "is no longer with the ABIM", but she did not officially retire. Weird? It is actually a bold lie and suppression of important information. They are trying to keep information from leaking out/suppressing documents requested in court. It is obvious to many outsiders that she is still pulling in a large income, but it will be expensed under "other" in their 990's.
Langdon appears nice on the outside at first blush, but she is actually vindictive and self absorbed. And if you are two high ranking African American woman working in the ABIM human resources department, she is a vindictive racist. Read the court documents. Physicians' fees paid the legal fees and to settle financially in order to get the ABIM, Langdon and Cassel off. And kept out of the Philly Inquirer!
Physicians paid to defend racism at the ABIM and even paid the hush money.
This is worse than complacency. It is complicity in harming many individuals. Ask the various employees and clients who have been discriminated against by Cassel, Langdon and Baron.
These are a few examples of the fraud and the razor's edge the ABIM is addicted to playing with--seeing how far they can go. There is something sick, perhaps attracted to scandal, at the ABIM.
The DOJ should put yellow tape around their files and computers. Go into their homes looking for the evidence before they destroy it.
Neither Baron, Cassel, Nora or Weiss have yet acknowledged that the ABMS/ABIM hired a goon thug convict (A Benjamin Mannes) with a very checkered past to do shady things for them.
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/arts/article/13032155/keeping-the-piece
The ABIM is not an Iowa testing company anymore. It is a pyramidal scheme run by professional liars. Each lie is compounded covering for the original sins of their financial and political scamming.
Dr. Salas Rushford's site. Support someone who is fighting this crime syndicate. Donate to doctors justice.
http://www.doctorsjustice.com/donate
NEJM: Knowing What We Don’t Know — Improving Maintenance of Certification
ReplyDeleteRichard J. Baron, M.D., and Clarence H. Braddock, III, M.D., M.P.H.
November 30, 2016DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1612106
The title of this NEJM "perspective" piece should have been,
"Realizing That We Got It Wrong -- Listening to the AMA House of Delegates Resolution To END ALL MANDATORY MOC IMMEDIATELY!"
The NEJM submission authors were brought into the ABIM fold in 2007 and 2008 respectively. Clarence Braddock III was elected to the board of directors just as the "director of investigations" A. Benjamin Mannes was hired by Christine Cassel, Bob Wachter, and Dr. Baron.
There is a profound disconnect at the elitist ABIM offices. Their executives and officers have exhibited the inability of finding pathways to simple "ratiocination." But they can often muster up some of that trademarked ABMS 'fractal air' they are so famous for. Little puffs of nothing out of the brain onto a computer screen and sent to their corporate cronies for publication.
In regard to the profoundly complex problems of medical science and how to apply it to everyday practice, they are completely at a loss. Except for the titles. They are magnificent at titles, which their armies of multi-million dollar communications officers come up with for them from time to time.
There is an even greater chasm between their cerebral matter and the sensitivities of the central nervous system regarding what common people call "self-realization". Moral sufferings are seldom experienced in lieu of the complexity of nervous anxiety that comes form having to look over their shoulders for hidden cameras, listening devices, hacking of document files and emails, and on an on. Those who live by the police state rules usually die by the same set of unethical unlawful rules.
Across the entire ABMS medical boards and umbrella organization they are so far from understanding even the notion of conscience.
Richard Baron, Christine Cassel, Robert Wachter, et al, are still at the moral stages in their personal and professional development where they consider conscience to be only the little tinges of guilt that they suppress daily. For all their wrongdoing and immorality--comprised of financial scams, political cheating, price fixing, racketeering and cover-ups of their blatant misconduct as state actors--they deserve to be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
The abuse of political position and power, dissemination of false science, encouragement of others to commit public fraud for them, engagement in willful influence pedaling, and back-channel dealings is another aspect of what they must daily disavow from. They hide well from themselves and their personal responsibility. In that they are very highly skilled.
The obvious improper use of physician fees by executives and senior staff for self-inurement is more than troubling.
Politically motivated activities where their executives have been involved in lobbying, political tampering, corporate cronyism are easily seen and public documents attest to it. There is ample evidence to suggest the ABIM/ABMS has been involved in test company fraud in conjunction with conspiring to undermine physicians' consumer law and constitutional guarantees.
All the above and so much more is all held in check with multiple fingers in the cracking, leaking dike.
They have run out of fingers at the ABIM and ABP. The ABMS is broken. They destroyed their own organizations: the ABMS franchise and trademark is worth nothing now. Each of the individual medical boards has committed suicide with greed and partisan political ambition to the degree that one can only wonder where the DOJ and IRS are at!
Are the authorities still at the listening stage before they close in on this criminal operation and shut it down? Or do we do it in civil court seeking injunctive relief with a MOC cease and desist order?
NEJM authors Richard Baron and Clarence Braddock III have no conflicts of interest?
ReplyDeleteClarence Braddock claims no relevant financial activities or relationships on the NEJM conflicts of interest form. This is a blatant false statement.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMp1612106/suppl_file/nejmp1612106_disclosures.pdf
Clarence Braddock is chair of the abim board of directors. Braddock is paid a significant honorarium for this ongoing service. He has served on the ABIM board for almost ten years.
http://www.abim.org/about/governance/board-of-directors.aspx
How much did the "#PizzaGate Queen" make for this 28 minute speech to the American Academy of Pediatrics? $300,000? They won't disclose it.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K-U-466VZE