Pubmed is a database of essentially every medical journal article, prepared by the National Institutes of Health. A computer scientist one told me that it was the best-designed database (in terms of user searching) that he knew of. He's probably right. Pubmed is now one of the main tools of medical research and clinical practice.
One of Al Gore's real accomplishments was to make Pubmed free online. Before then, it was sold through private contractors who, at one time, charged $1 a citation. The incremental cost of making Pubmed free was almost nothing, because the NIH library had to prepare it anyway. If they had done it as a paid-subscription service, they would have gotten maybe 10,000 subscriptions from medical school libraries, pharmaceutical companies, and malpractice lawyers. Now, there are millions of people using it around the world, including high school biology students, patients researching their disease, and everyone who writes about medicine on Wikipedia.
An interesting contrast is Lexis and Westlaw, the proprietary services that lawyers use to look up court cases. Those services charge a fortune. I don't know what the current fees are, but they used to be around $200 a month for a lawyer in private practice (correct me if I'm wrong). Westlaw had an annoying policy of not providing service to public libraries, so it was impossible for an ordinary citizen with no legal affiliation to get access. They carried the full text of the decisions, but these were public record, and in principle owned by the taxpayers and citizens, so they were selling our own public domain information back to us. They did add a certain value -- they had a reference system like the Internet before the Internet. But a well-run government database could provide the same service to everyone free (through taxes, of course) that the private vendors sell to only to the few thousand people who can afford to pay their high fees. Now the Internet is catching up with them with Findlaw, Cornell law school, etc.
Well-run government services can often do the job cheaper, and make information accessible to a lot more people, than private companies. Everybody pays a lot less through taxes than they would through private subscriptions.
This is tough-on-crime America, where we are competing with the former Soviet Union and China for the world's largest prison population.
If you want to know why -- one lawyer made an interesting point. In the U.S., our laws tend to get made not by following rational principles but by lobbying and negotiations among powerful interest groups. So the record companies get laws that can punish downloaders more severely than murderers, employers don't get punished at all for repeated, deliberate workplace safety violations that kill employees, etc.
The interesting thing is that they demonstrate their power by the length of the sentences. When you affront the police helicopter pilots, they go after you with really long sentences.
"Why should 100,000 people be denied the fun of playing with their toys just because a dozen toddlers go to the hospital and one or two of them die as a result?"
"It's not the manufacturer's fault, it's not the toy's fault, it's the parents' fault for not supervising their toddlers properly. Irresponsible parents absolve us of all responsibility."
"I want to play with my toys and I'm willing to see a couple of toddlers die as a result as long as I can blame their death on their parents' responsibility."
That argument doesn't play too well, even in the freedom-loving United States (much less nanny-state Europe and Australia). All you have to do is bring up one set of parents whose toddler died and that brings people back to reality.
When manufacturers try that in product liability cases, the juries don't buy it and hit them with big damage awards. "I knew some toddlers were dying but I'm a libertarian and it serves them right for having irresponsible parents" is not a successful trial strategy. And when government agencies ban these products, the (elected) politicians back them up. And the voters back them up.
You've lost that argument. If anyone is on the high school debating team and wants to continue it, I'll leave it to you.
That's right. In order to protect their trademark rights, they have to act like assholes.
That's why the U.S. Olympics committee goes around making "Olympic Restaurant"s change their names. Fortunately reason prevailed for a change and Olympus, Washington didn't have to change its name.
They're worried they'll lose their trademark like Aspirin, Formica, and Refrigerator.
Xerox had a whole department sending out xeroxed legal letters to people telling them not to use Xerox as a verb.
That included a lot of socialists, Communists and union organizers. http://vault.fbi.gov/Highlander%20Folk%20School Sometimes the only newspaper that would cover their work was the Daily Worker.
Yes, but the prosecutors decide what he gets charged with in the first place. They're the ones who decide whether he's facing 0-6 months or 10 years.
The main reason for deviating downward from the guidelines is "cooperating with the prosecution." Defendants literally get away with murder and walk free if the prosecutor recommends it.
Or, if he goes to trial, do they throw the book at him and hit him with 10 years?
That's the problem that people were complaining about with Aaron Swartz, and hackers generally. You can't defend yourself -- even when the judges, the prosecutors and the public don't understand the technology. If you try to explain, you wind up with severe sentences.
And in order to get 0-6 months, the other thing they want him to do is rat on his co-conspirators. The problem with this is that he was a journalist who has lots of confidential sources. Do they want him to expose his confidential sources?
I call myself a journalist. For 30 years I made a living (most of the time) by writing for magazines, newspapers and web outlets, first as an employee who came into the office every day, and then as a freelancer who worked from home.
I've written stories about schools, housing, police brutality, insurance, supermarkets, the military, law, medicine, computers, the environment, and engineering. My main beat is science and medicine, and I mostly report about new research and treatments to doctors to help them evaluate how much evidence there is behind it. I've also written about dangerous medical products that blew up in operating rooms and killed or injured patients, etc.
Under the First Amendment, and the court cases that defined it, everyone has a pretty broad right to say or publish what they want. That's not my right as a working journalist, that's the right of everyone under our laws, including every student, amateur, part-time aspiring publisher, professional, or political flack. There are a few limits under the law of libel and criminal law, but not too much, particularly when you're writing about public figures. That's the law.
Most of the time I'm not even credentialed. I tell them I'm on assignment for XYZ, or I'm a freelancer, and that's it. I never got a police press pass, because I don't have to ask them for permission to work.
I've run into a lot of problems and confrontations in my career, and I've had to make a lot of decisions about what I as a journalist am supposed to do, after discussions with my editors and other journalists. So from that experience I've developed some guidelines.
I define journalism, as I do it and my colleagues do it, in a certain way because it works.
My job is to tell the truth to my audience. O'Keefe doesn't do that.
O'Keefe is a political operative who gets paid by right-wing organizations to attack Democrats. O'Keefe once said that the job of a journalist was to put a camera in front of someone and wait until he says something stupid. That's exactly wrong.
For example, I interviewed a military doctor who worked Iraq. Now I think the war in Iraq was wrong and a disaster, and he knew what I thought. But my job was to give him a fair chance to explain his message on his own terms, and he did a good job. I also gave him a couple of critical questions that he's probably heard before, and he did a good job of answering them. I didn't try to make him look like a fool or evil -- the way O'Keefe treats his enemies.
I've interviewed nuclear power engineers and chemical plant managers. I had my own ideas about their work, but I let them explain themselves in their own terms, and I wrote stories giving the arguments on both sides.
Principia Mathematica by Whitehead and Russell was supposed to be an exercise in deriving all of mathematics from one function (I think it was AND NOT or something like that).
I think I can derive all of journalism from one principle: Get both sides of the story. When you have a controversy, as you usually do, you have to make an honest effort to give a good, fair argument to all sides. The strongest case is that when you attack somebody, you have to call them up and let them give their side. Maybe some cop beat up a handcuffed kid who wasn't resisting in front of a half dozen witnesses. I call up the police department to see what they have to say. Maybe some chemical company is pouring toxic wastes into the water table. About half the time they just dig themselves in deeper, and the other half of the time it turns out to be more complicated than it sounded after I just talked to one side. (If you want to understand the process, look up John Stuart Mill's On Liberty.)
That's the difference between me and O'Keefe. I'm trying to be fair to everybody, and give everybody's side. If Acorn is doing something egregiously wrong, like helping pimps set up brothels with teenage prostitutes, then I or any journalist would write about it. But that's not what O'Keefe did.
As somebody else here pointed out, the New York Civil Liberties Union has an Android app which transmits your video to the NYCLU web site instead of storing it on your phone.
While it is true that an idiot with a camera can manipulate footage for his own gain http://articles.latimes.com/2013/mar/07/local/la-me-0308-acorn-20130308 it's also true that lawyers know how to investigate criminal incidents and can often expose the manipulation. For example, a defense lawyer who deals with that stuff all the time said, the first thing you do is look at the whole unedited tape. If the Obama administration had done that with James O'Keefe's attack on ACORN, O'Keefe wouldn't have been able to get away with his lies. Under US law, BTW, if there is an investigation into a crime, a judge can subpoena the entire video. That applies even to journalists, as well as to fake journalists like O'Keefe, and to bystanders who record it on cellphones.
After an assault or a police confrontation, when different witnesses tell different stories, it's hard to reconstruct the facts. If you have a video of the incident, even part of the incident, that gives you some objective, reliable information to work with. Everybody knows that the video is just part of the story. The video doesn't testify by itself in court. Lawyers have to interview the photographer, consider the circumstances of the recording, and treat the video like any other piece of evidence. If you show a video of the cops beating up a suspect, the cops' lawyers have the right to give their version of what went on before that.
The more evidence you have, the more likely you are to figure out the truth.
When I look at the history of videos of police encounters in the last few years, I see a lot of incidents where the cops blatantly violated the law, committed assaults against innocent people, and committed perjury to cover it up. The videos at least got the false charges thrown out (although very seldom were the cops fired or prosecuted). Overall, the effect of videos has been good.
Everybody who dealt with the cops knew for years that this was going on. Videos are making it easier to prove it. Cities are going to get hit with $500,000 lawsuits like Manny Garcia is bringing. The experience has been that they just settle, don't punish the cops, and don't reform their practices. But maybe if they lose a few millions of dollars in lawsuits, and their taxpayers find their real estate taxes are doubling to pay for it, they'll start to pay attention.
I don't have enough details to know for sure what happened, but I do know two things:
(1) If she wanted copies of her husband's medical records after he died, she could have gotten them. I know that a patient is legally entitled to copies of his own records, and I'm pretty sure that a patient's next of kin is entitled to them, just for asking.
OTOH, if she took the hospital's records out of the records room, and didn't return them, that sounds like theft. She wasn't even leaving the hospital with the records they needed to return them. Nobody would know if she went through the records and threw out everything that didn't support her malpractice case. In order to admit the records into the trial, she would have to explain where she got them.
Why would a hospital executive even be motivated to destroy the records, before they brought a lawsuit, and before anyone even knew that the radiologist missed a spot on the x-ray?
Even if they had caught an early cancer in the x-ray, he'd be unlikely to be alive 8 years later.
There's no screening for stomach cancer the way there is for breast cancer. That early stage of cancer isn't something they would normally look for on an x-ray. If you see a tiny speck on an x-ray, who knows what that is? The only way to tell is with a biopsy. There are dozens or hundreds of specks on x-rays. If you biopsied them all, you'd have hundreds of holes.
Without the details, I can't tell what happened. But the story does have the problems I outlined. People sometimes exaggerate to make a better story. They don't even intend to lie, they just think of it as telling a better story.
I used to follow medical malpractice cases in the 1980s and 1990s. I went to legal conferences in which lawyers warned medical personnel against altering records. They essentially always get caught, Medical records are photocopied and passed on to specialists, insurance companies, etc.
There have been many cases of doctors who altered records, by whiting them out and copying them. When the malpractice lawyers looked at all the records, they saw the difference between the copies. That kicks it up from medical malpractice (that could happen to anyone) to fraud. If it did happen, that's the kind of case in which lawyers get huge damages because they have an element of outrage.
Same thing with stealing x-rays from the records room. There are controls in place to prevent this. One of the things that's wrong with your story is that it sounds like your friend's wife took the x-rays without authorization. That's a firing offense, and it might be criminal as well.
I've heard of all kinds of outrages by doctors, lawyers and the whole crew, but nothing like that. It sounds like something that a TV script writer would come up with when he has to get a new story out every week.
Unless the "tiny white dot" is more than a few millimeters in diameter, it could just be a dust speck or processing error on the x-ray film, which can usually be safely ignored. Of course, in hindsight it's much easier to see that the dot is cancerous.
You can't appreciate how X-rays can be ambiguous and hard to interpret unless you've looked at a few, and seen it. Radiologists have developed a whole language to match that ambiguity. Radiologists don't usually say that a spot is "cancer," they say it's "consistent with cancer" or with a lot of other things.
There are lots of spots that they can't identify without a biopsy, and if they biopsied every suspicious spot, they'd kill more patients than they save.
Yes, in hindsight, you can go back to the X-ray, and find a spot that looked like a hundred other spots, but turned into cancer.
They want no patient oversight of what they are doing because a 5 minutes google search might convince you they are not doing a stellar job after all.
It is terrifying that some people think that 5 minutes on google somehow will make them more informed than 10 years of medical training plus years of actual medical practice. Self diagnosis via google is a HUGE problem because disease processes are complicated and there are a lot of subtle distinctions the lay-person will not know anything about.
I write some of those things that you will find in a 5-minute Google search about your disease, and you are exactly right.
If you read for example Wikipedia or Huffington Post, you'll see that many or most people don't appreciate the difference between a human study and a mouse study, association and causality, progression-free survival and overall survival, an abstract and a journal publication, etc.
The more I learn about medicine, the more I realize how little I know and how easy it is to misunderstand a journal article. If you get one word wrong, you can completely misunderstand the article.
When my own friends ask me for information about their conditions, I don't give them my own articles, I give them usually-paywalled articles from the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, JAMA, and the peer-reviewed journals. That's where I get my information from.
When I have a medical problem, I do look up as much as I can on Google and the peer-reviewed journals, but I don't make my own medical decisions. I find a doctor that I can trust (admittedly not easy).
It's true that there are some common conditions that come up over and over again, and you can get a good idea about how to manage them with a Google search. What you can't know is whether you're in one of those common situations or whether you're in one of the common exceptions.
I encourage people to educate themselves about medicine. I think it's fascinating and empowering. However, the first step in education is realizing how little you know. In medicine, you have to realize how complicated it is, how much there is to know, and how easy it is for you to make a mistake.
To a doctor, it's nothing special that you suffered explosive diarrhea in the middle of the hospital elevator - that happens once a week, and it could be medically important. To a patient, that's a terribly embarrassing episode that shouldn't be in records, and even considering storing such a thing is grounds for a lawsuit.
You can bring a lawsuit against anybody for anything if you have a couple of thousand dollars for the filing fees and a brother-in-law who's a lawyer. But I don't understand how that patient could have any legitimate claim. It's not libel, because it actually happened. Are you just making up a hypothetical, or has a doctor ever been sued for writing something in the patient record?
If a patient has an episode of explosive diarrhea, that belongs in the patient chart. It could be a neurological condition, an auto-immune condition, or a parasitic infection. It could be a sign of a lot of things, some of them life-threatening. It might get worse a few years later, and in the face of an illness they can't identify, the next doctor might read through the whole patient record, and that might be a piece of the pattern.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's an example of government-generated data http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
Pubmed is a database of essentially every medical journal article, prepared by the National Institutes of Health. A computer scientist one told me that it was the best-designed database (in terms of user searching) that he knew of. He's probably right. Pubmed is now one of the main tools of medical research and clinical practice.
One of Al Gore's real accomplishments was to make Pubmed free online. Before then, it was sold through private contractors who, at one time, charged $1 a citation. The incremental cost of making Pubmed free was almost nothing, because the NIH library had to prepare it anyway. If they had done it as a paid-subscription service, they would have gotten maybe 10,000 subscriptions from medical school libraries, pharmaceutical companies, and malpractice lawyers. Now, there are millions of people using it around the world, including high school biology students, patients researching their disease, and everyone who writes about medicine on Wikipedia.
An interesting contrast is Lexis and Westlaw, the proprietary services that lawyers use to look up court cases. Those services charge a fortune. I don't know what the current fees are, but they used to be around $200 a month for a lawyer in private practice (correct me if I'm wrong). Westlaw had an annoying policy of not providing service to public libraries, so it was impossible for an ordinary citizen with no legal affiliation to get access. They carried the full text of the decisions, but these were public record, and in principle owned by the taxpayers and citizens, so they were selling our own public domain information back to us. They did add a certain value -- they had a reference system like the Internet before the Internet. But a well-run government database could provide the same service to everyone free (through taxes, of course) that the private vendors sell to only to the few thousand people who can afford to pay their high fees. Now the Internet is catching up with them with Findlaw, Cornell law school, etc.
Well-run government services can often do the job cheaper, and make information accessible to a lot more people, than private companies. Everybody pays a lot less through taxes than they would through private subscriptions.
Agreed. 30 days is over the top.
This is tough-on-crime America, where we are competing with the former Soviet Union and China for the world's largest prison population.
If you want to know why -- one lawyer made an interesting point. In the U.S., our laws tend to get made not by following rational principles but by lobbying and negotiations among powerful interest groups. So the record companies get laws that can punish downloaders more severely than murderers, employers don't get punished at all for repeated, deliberate workplace safety violations that kill employees, etc.
The interesting thing is that they demonstrate their power by the length of the sentences. When you affront the police helicopter pilots, they go after you with really long sentences.
We've been through this argument before.
"Why should 100,000 people be denied the fun of playing with their toys just because a dozen toddlers go to the hospital and one or two of them die as a result?"
"It's not the manufacturer's fault, it's not the toy's fault, it's the parents' fault for not supervising their toddlers properly. Irresponsible parents absolve us of all responsibility."
"I want to play with my toys and I'm willing to see a couple of toddlers die as a result as long as I can blame their death on their parents' responsibility."
That argument doesn't play too well, even in the freedom-loving United States (much less nanny-state Europe and Australia). All you have to do is bring up one set of parents whose toddler died and that brings people back to reality.
When manufacturers try that in product liability cases, the juries don't buy it and hit them with big damage awards. "I knew some toddlers were dying but I'm a libertarian and it serves them right for having irresponsible parents" is not a successful trial strategy. And when government agencies ban these products, the (elected) politicians back them up. And the voters back them up.
You've lost that argument. If anyone is on the high school debating team and wants to continue it, I'll leave it to you.
That's right. In order to protect their trademark rights, they have to act like assholes.
That's why the U.S. Olympics committee goes around making "Olympic Restaurant"s change their names. Fortunately reason prevailed for a change and Olympus, Washington didn't have to change its name.
They're worried they'll lose their trademark like Aspirin, Formica, and Refrigerator.
Xerox had a whole department sending out xeroxed legal letters to people telling them not to use Xerox as a verb.
Good point.
Rosa Parks was able to organize effectively because of a coordinated radical movement in the U.S., which taught her how to organize. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlander_Research_and_Education_Center
That included a lot of socialists, Communists and union organizers. http://vault.fbi.gov/Highlander%20Folk%20School Sometimes the only newspaper that would cover their work was the Daily Worker.
Perhaps you should read up on U.S. history.
You might start here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_sedition_act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_goldman#.22Inciting_to_riot.22
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_v._United_States#The_court.27s_decision
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Democratic_National_Convention
Yes, but the prosecutors decide what he gets charged with in the first place. They're the ones who decide whether he's facing 0-6 months or 10 years.
The main reason for deviating downward from the guidelines is "cooperating with the prosecution." Defendants literally get away with murder and walk free if the prosecutor recommends it.
Can you imagine having to work for a living after 60 years of living on a trust fund? It must be hell.
Worse than you can imagine. He had to give up his Lexus for a Honda.
Right. This story is about a poor man who lost his $1 million savings.
(1) Keys worked for the LAT, and allegedly gave Anonymous the password
(2) Then Keys joined Reuters. The alleged crime was done before he joined Reuters.
Can he still get 0-6 months if he goes to trial?
Or, if he goes to trial, do they throw the book at him and hit him with 10 years?
That's the problem that people were complaining about with Aaron Swartz, and hackers generally. You can't defend yourself -- even when the judges, the prosecutors and the public don't understand the technology. If you try to explain, you wind up with severe sentences.
And in order to get 0-6 months, the other thing they want him to do is rat on his co-conspirators. The problem with this is that he was a journalist who has lots of confidential sources. Do they want him to expose his confidential sources?
Can he still get 0-6 months if he refuses to rat?
Madoff had a serious impact on rich peoples' lives.
That carries a much more severe sentence than merely having a serious impact on ordinary peoples' lives.
Like Murdoch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacking_scandal
Fair is fair. Rupert Murdoch went to jail for hacking. Why shouldn't Aaron Swartz go to jail for hacking?
I call myself a journalist. For 30 years I made a living (most of the time) by writing for magazines, newspapers and web outlets, first as an employee who came into the office every day, and then as a freelancer who worked from home.
I've written stories about schools, housing, police brutality, insurance, supermarkets, the military, law, medicine, computers, the environment, and engineering. My main beat is science and medicine, and I mostly report about new research and treatments to doctors to help them evaluate how much evidence there is behind it. I've also written about dangerous medical products that blew up in operating rooms and killed or injured patients, etc.
Under the First Amendment, and the court cases that defined it, everyone has a pretty broad right to say or publish what they want. That's not my right as a working journalist, that's the right of everyone under our laws, including every student, amateur, part-time aspiring publisher, professional, or political flack. There are a few limits under the law of libel and criminal law, but not too much, particularly when you're writing about public figures. That's the law.
Most of the time I'm not even credentialed. I tell them I'm on assignment for XYZ, or I'm a freelancer, and that's it. I never got a police press pass, because I don't have to ask them for permission to work.
I've run into a lot of problems and confrontations in my career, and I've had to make a lot of decisions about what I as a journalist am supposed to do, after discussions with my editors and other journalists. So from that experience I've developed some guidelines.
I define journalism, as I do it and my colleagues do it, in a certain way because it works.
My job is to tell the truth to my audience. O'Keefe doesn't do that.
O'Keefe is a political operative who gets paid by right-wing organizations to attack Democrats. O'Keefe once said that the job of a journalist was to put a camera in front of someone and wait until he says something stupid. That's exactly wrong.
For example, I interviewed a military doctor who worked Iraq. Now I think the war in Iraq was wrong and a disaster, and he knew what I thought. But my job was to give him a fair chance to explain his message on his own terms, and he did a good job. I also gave him a couple of critical questions that he's probably heard before, and he did a good job of answering them. I didn't try to make him look like a fool or evil -- the way O'Keefe treats his enemies.
I've interviewed nuclear power engineers and chemical plant managers. I had my own ideas about their work, but I let them explain themselves in their own terms, and I wrote stories giving the arguments on both sides.
Principia Mathematica by Whitehead and Russell was supposed to be an exercise in deriving all of mathematics from one function (I think it was AND NOT or something like that).
I think I can derive all of journalism from one principle: Get both sides of the story. When you have a controversy, as you usually do, you have to make an honest effort to give a good, fair argument to all sides. The strongest case is that when you attack somebody, you have to call them up and let them give their side. Maybe some cop beat up a handcuffed kid who wasn't resisting in front of a half dozen witnesses. I call up the police department to see what they have to say. Maybe some chemical company is pouring toxic wastes into the water table. About half the time they just dig themselves in deeper, and the other half of the time it turns out to be more complicated than it sounded after I just talked to one side. (If you want to understand the process, look up John Stuart Mill's On Liberty.)
That's the difference between me and O'Keefe. I'm trying to be fair to everybody, and give everybody's side. If Acorn is doing something egregiously wrong, like helping pimps set up brothels with teenage prostitutes, then I or any journalist would write about it. But that's not what O'Keefe did.
First he set up a trap, w
After they have him stuffed they fit him with animatronics so he'll jump up every so often to scare the shit out of tourists.
Didn't they do that with Ronald Reagan?
As somebody else here pointed out, the New York Civil Liberties Union has an Android app which transmits your video to the NYCLU web site instead of storing it on your phone.
That Free Speech Zone cage was at the Democratic Convention in Boston.
So I don't count on the Democrats to uphold my constitutional rights.
At least Landau got a $795,000 settlement.
http://blogs.westword.com/latestword/2011/05/alexander_landau_795000_police_brutality_settlement.php
If you arrest somebody with a pistol, you don't have to kill him. You can take him into custody.
I can't imagine how you could take someone into custody with a drone.
While it is true that an idiot with a camera can manipulate footage for his own gain http://articles.latimes.com/2013/mar/07/local/la-me-0308-acorn-20130308 it's also true that lawyers know how to investigate criminal incidents and can often expose the manipulation. For example, a defense lawyer who deals with that stuff all the time said, the first thing you do is look at the whole unedited tape. If the Obama administration had done that with James O'Keefe's attack on ACORN, O'Keefe wouldn't have been able to get away with his lies. Under US law, BTW, if there is an investigation into a crime, a judge can subpoena the entire video. That applies even to journalists, as well as to fake journalists like O'Keefe, and to bystanders who record it on cellphones.
After an assault or a police confrontation, when different witnesses tell different stories, it's hard to reconstruct the facts. If you have a video of the incident, even part of the incident, that gives you some objective, reliable information to work with. Everybody knows that the video is just part of the story. The video doesn't testify by itself in court. Lawyers have to interview the photographer, consider the circumstances of the recording, and treat the video like any other piece of evidence. If you show a video of the cops beating up a suspect, the cops' lawyers have the right to give their version of what went on before that.
The more evidence you have, the more likely you are to figure out the truth.
When I look at the history of videos of police encounters in the last few years, I see a lot of incidents where the cops blatantly violated the law, committed assaults against innocent people, and committed perjury to cover it up. The videos at least got the false charges thrown out (although very seldom were the cops fired or prosecuted). Overall, the effect of videos has been good.
Everybody who dealt with the cops knew for years that this was going on. Videos are making it easier to prove it. Cities are going to get hit with $500,000 lawsuits like Manny Garcia is bringing. The experience has been that they just settle, don't punish the cops, and don't reform their practices. But maybe if they lose a few millions of dollars in lawsuits, and their taxpayers find their real estate taxes are doubling to pay for it, they'll start to pay attention.
I don't have enough details to know for sure what happened, but I do know two things:
(1) If she wanted copies of her husband's medical records after he died, she could have gotten them. I know that a patient is legally entitled to copies of his own records, and I'm pretty sure that a patient's next of kin is entitled to them, just for asking.
OTOH, if she took the hospital's records out of the records room, and didn't return them, that sounds like theft. She wasn't even leaving the hospital with the records they needed to return them. Nobody would know if she went through the records and threw out everything that didn't support her malpractice case. In order to admit the records into the trial, she would have to explain where she got them.
Why would a hospital executive even be motivated to destroy the records, before they brought a lawsuit, and before anyone even knew that the radiologist missed a spot on the x-ray?
(2) Stomach cancer is almost always fatal. http://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/gastrointestinal_disorders/tumors_of_the_gi_tract/stomach_cancer.html If they did win a lawsuit, the grounds would be that he would have lived a few years longer if they caught it earlier, not that he would have survived if they caught it earlier.
Even if they had caught an early cancer in the x-ray, he'd be unlikely to be alive 8 years later.
There's no screening for stomach cancer the way there is for breast cancer. That early stage of cancer isn't something they would normally look for on an x-ray. If you see a tiny speck on an x-ray, who knows what that is? The only way to tell is with a biopsy. There are dozens or hundreds of specks on x-rays. If you biopsied them all, you'd have hundreds of holes.
Without the details, I can't tell what happened. But the story does have the problems I outlined. People sometimes exaggerate to make a better story. They don't even intend to lie, they just think of it as telling a better story.
I used to follow medical malpractice cases in the 1980s and 1990s. I went to legal conferences in which lawyers warned medical personnel against altering records. They essentially always get caught, Medical records are photocopied and passed on to specialists, insurance companies, etc.
There have been many cases of doctors who altered records, by whiting them out and copying them. When the malpractice lawyers looked at all the records, they saw the difference between the copies. That kicks it up from medical malpractice (that could happen to anyone) to fraud. If it did happen, that's the kind of case in which lawyers get huge damages because they have an element of outrage.
Same thing with stealing x-rays from the records room. There are controls in place to prevent this. One of the things that's wrong with your story is that it sounds like your friend's wife took the x-rays without authorization. That's a firing offense, and it might be criminal as well.
I've heard of all kinds of outrages by doctors, lawyers and the whole crew, but nothing like that. It sounds like something that a TV script writer would come up with when he has to get a new story out every week.
Unless the "tiny white dot" is more than a few millimeters in diameter, it could just be a dust speck or processing error on the x-ray film, which can usually be safely ignored. Of course, in hindsight it's much easier to see that the dot is cancerous.
You can't appreciate how X-rays can be ambiguous and hard to interpret unless you've looked at a few, and seen it. Radiologists have developed a whole language to match that ambiguity. Radiologists don't usually say that a spot is "cancer," they say it's "consistent with cancer" or with a lot of other things.
There are lots of spots that they can't identify without a biopsy, and if they biopsied every suspicious spot, they'd kill more patients than they save.
Yes, in hindsight, you can go back to the X-ray, and find a spot that looked like a hundred other spots, but turned into cancer.
They want no patient oversight of what they are doing because a 5 minutes google search might convince you they are not doing a stellar job after all.
It is terrifying that some people think that 5 minutes on google somehow will make them more informed than 10 years of medical training plus years of actual medical practice. Self diagnosis via google is a HUGE problem because disease processes are complicated and there are a lot of subtle distinctions the lay-person will not know anything about.
I write some of those things that you will find in a 5-minute Google search about your disease, and you are exactly right.
If you read for example Wikipedia or Huffington Post, you'll see that many or most people don't appreciate the difference between a human study and a mouse study, association and causality, progression-free survival and overall survival, an abstract and a journal publication, etc.
The more I learn about medicine, the more I realize how little I know and how easy it is to misunderstand a journal article. If you get one word wrong, you can completely misunderstand the article.
When my own friends ask me for information about their conditions, I don't give them my own articles, I give them usually-paywalled articles from the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, JAMA, and the peer-reviewed journals. That's where I get my information from.
When I have a medical problem, I do look up as much as I can on Google and the peer-reviewed journals, but I don't make my own medical decisions. I find a doctor that I can trust (admittedly not easy).
It's true that there are some common conditions that come up over and over again, and you can get a good idea about how to manage them with a Google search. What you can't know is whether you're in one of those common situations or whether you're in one of the common exceptions.
I encourage people to educate themselves about medicine. I think it's fascinating and empowering. However, the first step in education is realizing how little you know. In medicine, you have to realize how complicated it is, how much there is to know, and how easy it is for you to make a mistake.
To a doctor, it's nothing special that you suffered explosive diarrhea in the middle of the hospital elevator - that happens once a week, and it could be medically important. To a patient, that's a terribly embarrassing episode that shouldn't be in records, and even considering storing such a thing is grounds for a lawsuit.
You can bring a lawsuit against anybody for anything if you have a couple of thousand dollars for the filing fees and a brother-in-law who's a lawyer. But I don't understand how that patient could have any legitimate claim. It's not libel, because it actually happened. Are you just making up a hypothetical, or has a doctor ever been sued for writing something in the patient record?
If a patient has an episode of explosive diarrhea, that belongs in the patient chart. It could be a neurological condition, an auto-immune condition, or a parasitic infection. It could be a sign of a lot of things, some of them life-threatening. It might get worse a few years later, and in the face of an illness they can't identify, the next doctor might read through the whole patient record, and that might be a piece of the pattern.