In one of the videos and a newspaper account, Associate Professor Lou Sanner says he's giving out sick notes for "stress" (not a medical diagnosis). When commenting on social issues, physicians trade on the honor of our profession, benefiting from the public's assumption that the wisdom won of caring for so many at their most vulnerable imbues us with some privileged understanding of collective need. UW's doctors have demeaned not only the doctor-patient relationship, but in so doing, risked the stature doctors hold in our discourse on public policy. In the videos now circulating online, we witness multiple members of a noted family medicine department trash one of the well-recognized rights and privileges of their profession, with little forethought as to the consequences. It represents an employer's desire to verify through a respected, independent, medically qualified third party the fact of an illness and the true need for convalescence. A doctor's sick note is a serious document. They've managed to belittle a public trust between physicians, employers and patients. It teaches professionalism, and its faculty are supposed to model integrity. It's a good training program, committed to providing sorely-needed primary care doctors to the state of Wisconsin. It's sad, but what puzzles me most is how in the world three of the four physicians I can identify from these videos and other media reports are faculty members of UW's Family Medicine department, and one is a senior resident in that same department. There is no question these doctors are masking political opinion in the white coat of the medical profession, Dr. "When all's said and done, it's really the profession of medicine that has the black eye in this case," he says. Derse is the Director of Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities a the Medical College of Wisconsin. Arthur Derse called me up exclaiming, "Holy mackerel! It's much worse than it looked in the paper. In videos breathlessly presented throughout the conservative mediasphere this weekend, doctor after doctor is videotaped writing patently fraudulent sick notes so that the protesting teachers (whose contracts specify that missing work without an excuse can result in dismissal) can keep marching on against the state's union-busting Republican government.Īfter viewing the videos at my request last night, Dr. Family doctors feel your pain and have the battle scars to prove it.īut last week some of these weary warriors carried their patient advocacy too far. ![]() Family doctors work the front lines advocating for our interests amidst a disintegrating health care system, summoning the will to keep battling with insurers and administrators all while trying to hold on to their belief that they can change human behavior. Public employees are joining a struggle already familiar to most patients. No doubt many members of the University of Wisconsin's Department of Family Medicine share the teachers' concerns. It's a very real threat to their economic stability, one they'll be ill-equipped to tackle without the unionizing rights proposed legislation would deny them. Fears over becoming hostage to soaring health insurance premiums has Wisconsin's teachers and other public employees protesting in downtown Madison for the second week running.
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