medgremlin

I was very grateful that none of the cadavers we had at my medical school were John/Jane Does, and that we have a memorial service for the cadavers every year and invite the families to express gratitude.

I worked as a scribe and as an ER tech in a Level 1 peds hospital. I'm not even done with med school and I've already punched that card more times than I care to remember.

I have gotten pretty good at weaseling my way into in-groups despite being a queer socialist with strong opinions about human rights, unions, and civil rights. It took a lot of trial and error though.

I explained the concept of there being the two genders of "cis-male" and "political" to one of my professors at a religious university and he was actually interested to hear me out on it because he had never thought of it in that paradigm. I'm absolutely not saying that everyone can be convinced, but some people can be nudged in the right direction if you have a good rapport with them.

You have to be very careful about "filtering" as well. It becomes far too easy to write off a legitimate concern if it has to pass muster with your "filter" before you consider it. The HPI and subjective portions of a note are explicitly for the things the patient (or their caretaker) tells you. It is subjective. Then you do your objective examination and testing, then you make an assessment, and if you can justify that assessment with the testing and history, then you can make a plan. SOAP notes go in that order for a reason.

That doesn't mean you ignore them. You listen to what they're saying, maybe take it with a grain of salt, and actually get a good history and physical.

Stories like this make me very glad that I got my pediatric experience in a good children's hospital before starting medical school. The attending physicians made sure to drill it into everyone's heads that if the parent is expressing concern about a change in condition or "something just not being right", you report that to the patient's physician and nurse ASAP. Everyone from the physicians down to the admin folks were empowered to challenge decisions they thought weren't in the patient's best interest.

Hell, I even had a case where, as the ER tech, I challenged a physician on her diagnosis of a child and refused to let her discharge the kiddo without looking at him again. The mom told me something was wrong, and even with just an EMT license, I was able to see something was subtly wrong as well. It turns out the mom and I were right and the physician changed her diagnosis and admitted him to the hospital for treatment instead of discharging him home to follow up in clinic in a couple days.

Except that the sentencing keeps getting postponed.

That's the thing though...I think it is part of their due diligence to know what's going on in their own business. If they can't guarantee that it's safe, they shouldn't release it.

The c-suites have the ultimate power and therefore ultimate responsibility for whatever happens in their organization. Similar to how parents can be held criminally liable for their children's actions. It's just that much more incentive for them to make sure things are in order in their organization.

Also, Citizen's United ruled that corporations are people, so they can be held to the same standards of responsibility as other people.

I think the threshold for proving the "reasonable person" standard for companies should be extremely low. They are a complex organization that is supposed to have internal checks and reviews, so it should be very difficult for them to squirm out of liability. The C-suite should be first on the list for criminal liability so that they have a vested interest in ensuring that their products are actually safe.

I'd accept that if the makers of the self-driving cars can be tried for vehicular manslaughter the same way a human would be. Humans carry civil and criminal liability, and at the moment, the companies that produce these things only have nominal civil liability. If Musk can go to prison for his self-driving cars killing people the same way a regular driver would, I'd be willing to lower the standard.