The Great Infection Deflection, part 2 After reading of the low-seeming infection numbers Pennsylvania hospitals voluntarily reported to the state in 2004, I started thinking about what criteria hospitals - which are first and foremost businesses concerned with profitability - would most likely use to determine their own culpability in spreading killer infections. And although I don't have a copy of the actual Pennsylvania report in front of me, I do have four decades of experience with the way mainstream medicine works, and I can tell you this: No hospital, anywhere, admits liability for anything without being forced to, or at least being confronted with the reality that they WOULD be forced to if push came to shove. Kind of like with the drug companies, it usually takes people getting sick or dying and their relatives crying "foul" in the media or in the courtroom before anyone in the medical establishment is forced into accountability for mistakes. Need proof? Research reveals how hard it is to prove medical malpractice in anything but a wrong-limb-amputated or donor-heart-dropped-on-the-floor kind of case. This would be especially true over something as nebulous and hard to pin down as a hospital-borne infection. Think about it. The very first thing any hospital could say in defense is: Can you PROVE your mother/father/wife/child didn't contract this killer infection before admission? As anyone knows, you can't prove a negative. Unless a patient had the foresight, time, money, and energy to have themselves tested for every one of the dozens of common types of infections floating around most hospitals the hour before their admission, how could it be proven that they picked up a bug in the hospital and not in the cab on the ride over? And of course, it wouldn't make sense for hospitals to do this kind of advance screening before you go under the knife or into the examination room. That would both delay their lucrative "turnstile medicine" rate of patient turnover and rob them of their plausible deniability in the all-too-common case of infection-related illness or death. The bottom line is this: That report I mentioned in the first part of this essay which catalogued the nearly 12,000 patients sickened and 1,800 patients killed by infections in the Keystone State must surely represent only the most egregious, blatant, provable-beyond-doubt-in-a-court-of-law examples of hospital-borne infection… In other words, the undeniable cases that couldn't possibly have any explanation other than pure, cut-and-dried hospital liability. Admitting ANY except these would expose the medical centers to a tsunami of litigation. That means the REAL incidence of infection is probably 10 times that high. Easily. You aren't defenseless, though: Keep reading and I'll tell you a few things you can do… ****************************************************
Here are some fundamentals I haven't mentioned in a while - namely, three specific ways to reduce your risk of contracting a hospital-borne infection… Here they are:
Make sure everyone who touches you at the hospital - doctors, nurses, orderlies, X-ray technicians, or anyone else - has first washed their hands with soap and warm water. If that means you need to speak up and ask them, so be it. It isn't rude to protect your life. Before admission, take a thorough shower with any good non-antibacterial soap. Prior to any procedure, ask your doctor to perform a nose culture for Staphylococcus. Folks who carry Staph infections are more vulnerable to the mutated forms of the bacteria rampant in hospitals. Also, a negative culture provides some baseline proof should a hospital-borne Staph infection occur. Do these things and you'll be giving yourself as powerful an advantage as possible against the onslaught of potentially killer bacteria you'll face once you're located in a hospital bed. Of course, the best defense is to avoid the place altogether… That's not always possible, unfortunately. If you must take your chances at some point, take as few of them as you can. But be under no illusions: Your risk of coming home from the hospital with a deadly infection is many times greater than the 1,000-to-1 shot that certain state health departments would have you believe. Revealing, not concealing, William Campbell Douglass II, MD | 
