Wednesday, October 30, 2019

What Gives?



WHAT GIVES the American Board of Internal Medicine the ability to take away years of schooling, mountains of prior testing, sleepless nights of residency, and months of study for initial Board certification that we all had to pass?

WHAT GIVES the American Board of Internal Medicine the authority to magically un-certify physicians for not purchasing or their Maintenance of Certification program?

WHAT GIVES the American Board of Internal Medicine the right to take away over 25 years of my expertise with catheter ablation or pacemaker implantation when they've never once examined the quality of my work or spoken with my patients?

WHAT GIVES the American Board of Internal Medicine the right to tell insurance companies and hospitals when my board certification expires so those companies can suddenly refuse to issue payments or revoke my hospital privileges claiming by skills as a physician have expired?

The American Board of Internal Medicine says it is developing new strategies of physician testing in the name of improved patient care, but WHAT GIVES for those physicians it has de-certified and are now jobless?

Removing physicians with years of patient care experience because they refuse to pay a fee or perform needless computer tasks is not in the best interest of patient safety or quality of care.

So WHAT GIVES?

-Wes

PS: Please help support the legal efforts underway to end Maintenance of Certification for all subspecialties by contributing to at https://www.gofundme.com/practicing-physicians-of-america
(Every dollar helps. Please share this video with your colleagues, too.)

12 comments:

Corrupt NGOs said...

What gives the American Board of XYZ the right (authority) to suborn physician self-regulation to a corrupted unelected body of profiteers, corporate shills and political hacks.

Anonymous said...


What gives the ABMS the illusion that they can suborn medical science to political and corporate propaganda.

Darth Star (MOC) said...

A deceitful unscientific mandate without a mandate of any kind!

MOC is a "voluntary mandate" imposed on ABMS certified physicians without a single official vote ever cast for it from any "captured" diplomate or candidate.

MOC (maintenance of certification) is one of the biggest hoaxes and educational Ponzi schemes ever devised and thrust on a professional body. The only one of its kind in the world.

MOC's purpose is to control, collect physician/patient data, and to fill the corporate bottom lines of the rich elitist medical specialty boards.

Maintenance of certification - ABMS MOC - was cleverly devised (circa 1965) to manipulate the professional medical labor force and to feed the greed and power lust of the medical specialty boards' covetous umbrella organization in Chicago, the ABMS.

And to enhance the revenues and profits of their external and internal stakeholders.



Anonymous said...

Dr. Fisher, thank you for everything you do!

The Merger said...

A teenage boy enters the living room where his father is reading the New York Times.

"Dad, I know what line of work I want to go into when I grow up."

"What's that, son?"

"I want to go into organized crime."

"Public or private sector", responded the father without even batting a lid?

"Dad, didn't you hear, they've merged."

"Ethics in Conflict: Moral Distress as a Root Cause of Burnout" said...

Ethicists (on the take) ignoring real causes of physician burnout (due to liability issues) - a recitation of 20-year-old ABIM Foundation political propaganda

Something is dramatically wrong when elitist (non-clinician) thought-leaders are still allowed to propagate and disseminate political and social propaganda under the guise of research.
-
"Ethics in Conflict: Moral Distress as a Root Cause of Burnout
Authors
Elizabeth Dzeng, Robert M. Wachter"

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-019-05505-6?wt_mc=Internal.Event.1.SEM.ArticleAuthorOnlineFirst&utm_source=ArticleAuthorOnlineFirst&utm_medium=email&utm_content=AA_en_06082018&ArticleAuthorOnlineFirst_20191031

You know it's Bob and Chris, et al (together again) with more newspeak and doublespeak when . . .

. . . the disclaimers and conflicts of interest page are longer than anything actually written by the "lead author"? (All the "references" are from ABIM or their affiliates.)

Chris Cassel's conflicts page, which should have been included, is longer than anything she actually ever wrote herself. The JGIM would have to devote several months of publications just to print all of her conflicts of interest and give proper credit and honorable mentions to all her politically and financially conflicted ghostwriters and special interests groups.

_______________

"Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Christine Cassel, MD; Amy Markowitz, JD; and Alexander K. Smith, MD (all from the University of California, San Francisco) for helpful feedback on drafts of this editorial.

Funding Information
Dr. Dzeng is supported by the Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the NIH under Award Number KL2TR001870 as well as NIH grant 1R03AG060098.

Compliance with Ethical Standards
Conflict of Interest
Dr. Wachter reports that he is a member of the Lucian Leape Institute of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (no compensation except travel expenses); has a contract to UCSF from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to edit a patient-safety website; receives royalties from Lippincott Williams & Wilkins and McGraw-Hill for writing/editing several books; receives stock options for serving on the board of Accuity Medical Management Systems; receives a yearly stipend for serving on the board of The Doctors Company and on the Global Advisory Board for Teledoc; serves on the scientific advisory boards for Amino.com, PatientSafe Solutions, and EarlySense (for which he receives stock options); consults with Commure (for which he receives a stipend and stock options) and Forward (stock options); has a small royalty stake in CareWeb, a hospital communication tool developed at UCSF; has given > 200 talks (a few to for-profit entities including Nuance, GE, Health Catalyst, AvaCare) for which he has received honoraria; and holds the Benioff Endowed Chair in Hospital Medicine from Marc and Lynne Benioff and the Holly Smith Distinguished Professorship in Science and Medicine at UCSF. Dr. Dzeng reports no conflicts of interest.

Disclaimer
The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations."

Penny Porngate (Pennsylvania hardcore news) said...

Anybody doubt that the Pennsylvania justice system has some "extreme cases".

Remember this? (It makes you wonder about justice in the Commonwealth of PA.)

"In 2014, [impeached/indicted/convicted PA Attorney General] Kane’s office released close to 400 pages of emails between state government employees, including some high-ranking state officials, exchanged on the state’s email server that were full of racism, sexism and pornography. The scandal was dubbed Porngate, and Kane said it involved a number of judges, prosecutors and law enforcement officials.

“I couldn’t believe there was violence involved, and I couldn’t believe this wasn’t just some Playboy photos ... 398 pages, much of it hard-core porn,” Kane told “Nightline.”

“The hard-core pornography shared on state computers, on state time, between state actors … That is not boys being boys,” she continued. “It's assault upon our criminal justice system and quite honestly it’s unacceptable.”"


"On August 15, 2016, Kane was convicted of all charges, including two felony perjury charges, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice, and she announced her resignation the following day, effective August 17. ... On July 31, 2019, Kane was released from Montgomery County Prison."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Kane

Anonymous said...

Wes, I'm glad to see that you and so many others are actually standing up for the rights of fellow human beings - physicians and patients - who are being unfairly maligned by a corrupt corpus of self-appointed medical politicians. MOC is a big problem, because it has created what one could call the ABMS entitlement program. MOC as a mandate creates conditions so that two-bit thought-leaders can keep robbing us of time, money and our rights. They want longitudinal assessment next because it creates possibilities for a greater profit from continuous data collection. Big data is rapidly becoming a hidden source of funding for them. The ABIM and other medical boards are selling out the profession and our rights to the highest bidder.

There needs to be more people of real principle in the United States who will stand up and fight for what is right. Our country is degenerating in morality and losing sight of the truth. The news we see daily shows that in spades.

Do we have a free press? said...

Many issues such as MOC are being ignored by the main stream media. Basic human rights are eroding. A small core of dedicated people is needed who will actually speak the truth and not waver.

Dr Jonathan Treece said...

join a different board...I'm a member of the National Board of Physicians and Surgeons which many hospitals recognize now and it doesn't require all the bogus MOC! Family medicine board trying to run the same scam as Internal medicine.

Gary Alan Mohr said...

Dr. Wes, your indignation is legitimate. I have been board certified from 1982 through 2015, but no more. MOC amounts to annual recertification, without a shred of evidence that it makes better physicians. Opt out if you can. Sign up with the new National Board. Join the Association of American Physician and Surgeons, who are fighting this in court. Continue to speak out. Physicians need to recover some autonomy. We are under constant review by non-physicians who tell us how we must do out jobs - even though they have never spent a single day in medical school. They are sucking the life out of us, and even worse, deterring the best and brightest young people from even entering medicine. My son wanted to become a neurosurgeon and he would have been a great one. But after spending some time with me in my office and that of another physician, he said, "Dad, I hope you're not disappointed but I don't think I could put up with all the crap you have to put up with every day." "Son," I told him, "You will live longer and happier and healthier as an engineer."

Anonymous said...

The ABIM unfortunately appears to have become a self-admiration society with highly paid executives with many executive side-benefits unrelated to the value of the group. That there is no convincing evidence that MOC actually improves physician performance makes this even more tragic. In addition, the ABIM to date has refused to even consider a recertification process for those of us who have further concentrated their practice within a sub-specialty or limited one's practice to just procedures or one disease entity. The ABIM publicly notes that their certification should not be used for anything related to licensure so it overdue to just dump the ABIM. Join the NBPAS "The National Board of Physicians and Surgeons (NBPAS)" which provides a recertification process every two years based upon CME chosen by each member which is relevant to one's specialty. With this in hand, you have a certificate to prove you are still board certified to provide to state licensure boards or others.