Complete PHP Critical Look Takeaways
and a Special Open Town Hall to Exchange PHP Critical Looks; and BIG Developments with Senators and DOJ Eyeing Boards' ADA Abuses Resulting in Wrecked Careers
Just published the full kabob of PHPs: Critical Look Takeaways over on Physician Interrupted. It contains a truckload of morsels from the webinar that help give an overview of the PHP enterprise and pointers on how you might best approach it.
I won’t duplicate it here but, if you’re interested in the MRTC enterprise and one of the central foci of CPR’s dogged research work, I’d suggest you consider it required reading. So jump on over, and if you’re not yet a subscriber (also free!) to our sister publication Physician Interrupted, you really ought to become one. Neither newsletter bombards you with a lot of yada yada. I only publish when there’s something important to say, and when I’ve got enough mental bandwidth to put it down on paper.
PHPs (so-called ‘physician health programs’) are essentially the quasi-medical quasi-prosecutorial interrogation wing of the MRTC (medical regulatory therapeutic complex). Each state’s PHP franchisee serves as the exclusively contracted, quasi-medical fitness-for-duty evaluator conducting and/or funneling licensees into the private, for-profit “impaired physician” ecosystem comprised of specially selected “preferred programs” that tout specialzed expertise in “dealing with” physician impairment.1
You might be curious how a program becomes a “preferred” darling child of both the MLB and PHP, the concurrence itself a deeply troubling confluence. The answer you would likely get is “because it’s specially selected.”
Now, if you were to get persistent (careful now, you could be seen as disruptive, and, zap! you’ll be in an interrogation room in Kansas before you can click your heels), you might ask “why’s it specially selected?” And you’d be given an answer something to the effect “Well, these are programs that we prefer to work with, as they have [‘eh-heh’ throat clearing] special expertise in working with us physicians.”
Now, if you detect that there might be some circular reasoning at work here, just realize your kind of sharp thinking is the very sort of cognitive process this enterprise considers problematic.
Besides, they might add, “smarty pants thinking like that is exactly why we had to develop specialized centers with polygraph specialists and other types of interrogators utilizing highly refined Rorschach inkblots and self-incrimination screens like the MMPI and nifty false-postive experimental alcohol biomarker drug tests because youse people are too smart and think you can hide your illness. No siree, we’ve got top-notch sleuths, many of whom are psychologists whose profession changed its very code of ethics just so they could do detainee interrogation! And … we get you, doctor, to pay for all of it. Now, let’s see who's so smart.”
So, let’s be clear once and for all about the answer: the reason why these select centers are preferred is because they’re specially selected. And the reason why we prefer them is precisely because they’ve been specially selected. And others use these specially selected programs because they’ve agreed they’re preferred. And why ever would you select a program that wasn’t preferred? That’s exactly why we specifically selected it!
[“Hmmm,” you might be mulling, “I wonder if my thought disorder is rearing its ugly head again; better get back on my anti-psychotic.” Yes, it IS a thought disorder, but no, it’s not yours.]
PHPs: Critical Look – A Town Hall Zoom. Wednesday, May 3rd, 8pm EDT.
And … in that 2 part webinar, we posed an idea that got eager reception: an open Town Hall-type Zoom gathering where we’d have free-flowing conversation amongst our panel and attendees. It won’t be recorded because we know there’s deep concern about possible reprisal, and retaliation in this arena can be career-lethal.
Registration’s free. Even if you didn’t attend either of the webinar’s two parts, join us!
US Senators and DOJ Scrutinizing All State Medical Licensing Boards for Potentially Systematized Violations of Title II of the ADA.
I won’t overload you here, but there are some really promising developments happening regarding one of the key players in the MRTC ecosystem – state medical licensing boards (MLBs). Both members of the US Senate and the US DOJ Disability Rights Section are seriously examining MLBs’ potential array of violations of Title 2 of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
This is a HUGE development and I’ll post more details shortly. Be sure to check out the full letter.
Here’s your checklist:
Jump over to the PHP Critical Look Takeaways on our sibling (longer read) blog Physician Interrupted where we do deeper dives on MRTC shenanigans.
Check out the upcoming PHPs: Critical Look Open Town Hall May 3rd.
Read the Senators’ letter.
Celebrate that we’re making major headway and maintain optimism that we ARE going to remedy this disturbed system.
Have a great weekend.
“Impairment” is broadly defined by the unchallengeable and regulatorily captured MRTC enterprise and may include such things as back-talk, pointing out system deficiencies like understaffing and abuse of psychiatry for state purposes. To be on the safe side to, you know, protect the public, it takes a very comprehensive view of illnesses that clinicians might possess by asking if you are having, have ever had, or possibly even suspect that you might be harboring, an illness, or that someone else in your interpersonal circle might think you have or could potentially develop such a malady that could, in even the vaguest ways, result in less than saintly interactions with the “health care team,” patients, the prevailing medical leadership, administrators, your corporate owners, or the divine board.
It also includes - this, per official documents from the overarching trade group cartels FSPHP and FSMB - any condition that, as a diagnostic class, e.g. major depressive disorder, substance use disorder of any nature or degree, ADHD, etc., has the potential for resulting in some manifestation of impairment. “Potential for impairment” (this is a real concept touted by these cartels) is a justifying criterion for a PHP referral.
It doesn’t take a genius to see the danger in the misapplication of this rather broadly inclusive referral rationale.
I am hoping to introduce in subsequent posts the concepts of “potential for insanely abusive violation of due process” and “potential for systematized dual ADA violation by a) designating an entire class of disorders as warranting special treatment; and b) conflating potential for impairment with actual impairment.” Something tells me I won’t be as successful as the trade group cartels in getting it disseminated within AMA and APA as though it were gospel.
If I were still practicing psychiatry, I might propose that arrogant, grandiose, rights-denying thinking that poses such a threat to others as manifested by the above beliefs, touted openly while swaggering around town with a peace-officer badge dressed in quasi-judge black robe attire and threatening to kill others’ careers, ought to be grounds for civil commitment.