Medical Safety of Patients: Repressive Tolerance?

Medical Safety of Patients: Repressive Tolerance?

MEDICAL SAFETY OF PATIENTS [English summary - version 260608-0955]   These web sites (in Swedish, sites translatable here) on MEDICAL PATIENT SAFETY have been set up by a patient to report a case study with events extending from year 2007 to 2009, extended further up to 2026. Intellectually it actualizes, but it is not resolved by, the debate around the political idea of "repressive tolerance". The latter is to be interpreted as signifying the citizen's possibility to complain as an "escape valve", with no guarantee that the complaint is seriously and justly considered by the supposedly competent authorities, which may also be seen as guilty of legal malpractice. To add insult to injury, the injured citizen may be considered as a querulant (cf. the uniquely Swedish popular word, "rättshaverist"). It all is related in Sweden to the functions of the former  HSAN (The National Board of Health and Welfare), replaced later by  IVO (The Health and Social Care Inspectorate), and to the broader discussion of bureaucracy. The case presents the description of a patient's perceived sensational lack of empathy and rude behavior by a physician who was supposed to cure, in this case hypertension. A remarkable phenomenon also arose in that the patient felt shame for having been rebuffed and rejected so rudely, reminding cases of those who suffered but escaped the Holocaust and who did not want to tell to their children about their earlier experiences. My guess is that their feeling of shame comes from an unconscious doubt that their having been objects of such contemptuous behavior should and may have been deserved as it tells about some guilt that the victim is not aware of, the more so if the victim itself, despite it all, sees the perpetrator as a dignified human being who may have been right, the more so in the Christian view that every human being (your “neighbor”, fellow man) bears a divine spark in his mind or soul. In terms of analytical psychology it may be a question of psychological projections that also may explain the relation between co-dependency and abuse in more emotionally loaded personal relationships that ultimately may imply “Asklepian” (see below) matters of life and death. The case is also related to the closely affected issue of forms of power and violence that may follow social interaction as developed by Hannah Arendt in On violence [Swedish translation: Om våld, Aldus/Bonnier, 1970]. Together with well-established psychological knowledge of pathological narcissism it may be considered as a "bible" for the analysis of abusive behavior that in other extreme circumstances may lead to societal violence and terrorism as in many cases of mass shootings such as reported especially in the USA. From the cultural point of view this case study in the medical context can also be perceived as portraying an ongoing catastrophic rejection of the archetypal image of the physician's existence as implied by the Hippocratic oath and described, for instance, in "Asklepios: Archetypal image of the physician's existence" - (by Carl Kerényi, New York: Pantheon Books, 1959, orig. 1947, French transl. "Le médecin divin", 1956.) A more popular rendering is Gabriel Weston's Direct red: a surgeon's story (Vintage Books, 2009). The account above is illustrated with the copy of e-mail correspondence some years later between the patient and the administration of a hospital where an ambulance had taken the patient to the emergency department because of pains in the chest. A wrong diagnosis had the consequence of delaying for a couple of years an urgent operation of the infected gallbladder (cholecystectomy). In the meantime the patient suffered a sepsis and a heart infarction caused by continuing infection/inflammation in the body, followed by a heart operation (angioplasty or percutaneous coronary intervention PCI). Complaint was of no avail, illustrating further the lures of "repressive tolerance", dissuading from any further complaint to authorities. The whole is completed with three documents that illustrate a major problem in contact with a hospital’s emergency department and minor problems in the encounters with a doctor at a health center and with physiotherapists at the adjunct rehabilitations center, plus a document that illustrates dangers of over-medication and unnecessary early operation in the context of heart fibrillation. The final "complement", however, so late as in May 2026, seems to be my report (downloadable here in html-format) to Stockholm's "Southern Hospital" (Swedish: Södersjukhuset), its department of Cardiology, after my latest serious diagnosis of congestive heart failure. The report was motivated by my perception of having been "forgotten", as if I were already dead, in the supposedly periodical follow-up after "final" information and decisions on medication. They were decisions coming "von oben", forgetting that my medical heart history was initiated by "von oben" several mistakes in medical diagnosis and medication. In this context “von oben” does not mean lack of due respect or recognition of medical professional knowledge and authority of physicians but rather by a recognition of a lack of empathy and courtesy that is inbuilt into the structure and teaching of a heartless type of science in an extremely secularized technical culture: “Sweden, Once the World’s Conscience”. I draw a profile of such science in my article on artificial intelligence – AI, especially in a chapter on “Mathematical computer-oriented minds”, and noting elsewhere that the  AI-bubble is already “working” in medical practice – health care with“the medical field where theory is gradually reduced to statistics”. And “Nobody seems to mind that the idea of neural networks, as elaborated in recurrent neural networks originated in statistical mechanics”. Finally, I wish to underline that the whole issue is further complicated by the late increased computerization of the communication between patients and the health organization of a country like Sweden. Personal contact between patient and especially doctors outside the context of a bodily meeting and consultation (usually for a maximum of 20 minutes after waiting for several weeks), is restricted to a computer communication (not yet chatbot), as in Sweden's 1177.se or the application Alltid-Öppet, (in English "Always-Open"), which by the way in September 2023 was ranked, by only a few users  who care to report their valuations, at the lowest level of (1) out of maximum 5 quality levels. This means that the patients incur into all the kind of increasing problems, including some described in my essay on the meaning of human-computer interaction (HCI). They include the random impossibility (because of bugs or design) to neither write something to anybody in a particular health center or specialized clinic, nor to complain to anybody. If there is a link for complaints, or to "Contact me", it has sometimes turned out to be a dead link, as if it were an app-"bug". When I got a message from a physician, e.g. the result from a blood-test, I discovered that the physician had turned off the app’s option or possibility for me as patient to ask for a further clarification, such as the degree of improvement of the readings related to the risks of drug’s side effects that included probability to get a diabetes-type2. That is, a paradoxical situation in view of the app-name (“always open” one-way to the patient, but “closed” – no allowed response and questions to the doctor who is too busy and overworked). The number and type of characters that the patient is allowed to write in a field is restricted (e.g. no quotation marks, nor questions marks) and in Alltid-Öppet it is not possible to neither copy and paste a previously edited text whose input-volume would require a period of time that exceeds the maximum time allowed before being automatically out-logged. For the rest, whenever there is an open (at some particular weekdays and times of the day) telephone-reception, the patient who wishes to leave a message to a doctor may be informed that the doctor has no time to read patients' messages and still less to answer them. A clinic may advise the patient to contact the health center for his problem, and the other way-round, the phone-contact at the health center may propose that the patient should rely upon his prior contacts with the clinic to which he had earlier been referred to. And all what was written up here in this last paragraph can be neutralized by a "Kafkaesque" claiming that it is an expression of somebody being a "rättshaverist", a special Swedish word considered to be untranslatable but perhaps closest to being a "litigant".[Proceed to the complete Introduction in Swedish language][Sites translatable here]
physical copy

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