Immoral, Illegal ‘Practice of Medicine’

Recent events in response to COVID-19 expose the illegal and immoral practice of medicine.

By law, only licensed clinical physicians can practice medicine. Particularly, only physicians or specially trained nurses can perform triage, often a life-or-death decision.

With a large increase in symptomatic COVID-19 cases in certain locales, there are insufficient numbers of hospital beds and limited amounts of life-saving drugs. This necessitates triage of patients. Triage comes from French, meaning to separate or categorize. Triage involves deciding who gets care now and who must wait or not get care at all. The triage decision is always specific to the unique situation, considering all patient factors, and done by the responsible physician.

Patients are supposed to have a trust or fiduciary relationship with their doctors. A patient cedes temporary control of his or her body to the chosen physician for the benefit of that patient.

A fiduciary relationship is a voluntary, personal, in fact intimate relationship between two individuals. A patient cannot have a fiduciary relationship with a bureaucracy—hospital or insurance company—or with a government, state or federal.

When a bureaucrat or politician is the medical decision maker, the fiduciary connection is severed, as is happening in Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, and Pennsylvania.

Leilani Lutali is a woman with end-stage renal disease. A good friend, Jaimee Fougner, agreed to donate one of his healthy kidneys to her for transplantation at University Hospital in Aurora, Colorado. Her doctor scheduled the surgery. The hospital transplant service canceled the procedure because Ms. Lutali “refused COVID-19 vaccination.” Furthermore, Ms. Lutali has COVID-19 antibodies indicating she has natural immunity from previous asymptomatic COVID-19 infection.

According to Mr. Fougner, her live kidney donor, the hospital decided to “murder my friend.” Hospital administration is practicing medicine both illegally and immorally.  In fact, a hospital, or any bureaucracy for that matter including government, should never practice medicine–they are not medical fiduciaries.

In Idaho and Alaska, state health agencies have recently reported a deluge of COVID-19 patients. To help deal with too many patients and not enough ICU beds or drugs such as Remdesivir, Hydroxychloroquine, or Ivermectin, both states have implemented so-called “crisis standards of care.”

These standards are rules promulgated by bureaucrats that instruct physicians what criteria to use when triaging patients. Based on these criteria, patients will get care or will not get care, they will live or die. Criteria vary from state to state and include factors such as age, likelihood of survival, pre-existing medical conditions, and social concerns. For example, in Pennsylvania, proposed crisis standards “give preference [during triage] … to low-income persons in order to balance income inequalities.”

Official crisis standards of care take away judgment and decision-making from the responsible physicians on the scene. These standards destroy patient-doctor fiduciary relationship.

Medical practice by non-physicians is clearly illegal—it is also immoral.

At graduation from medical school, U.S. physicians swear the Hippocratic oath, whether the 2500-year old original or the updated version, with a clear moral imperative. A specific physician accepts responsibility for a specific patient and offers that patient best possible care, without regard to all other factors, including society at large.

When triaging, the true fiduciary, the moral physician, makes no judgment of the value or social condition of the patient. That healer simply offers the patient the best care, regardless whether that person is a saint, terrorist, or murderer; with no consideration of political affiliation, skin color, religion, or income status; and ignoring any labels such as victim or oppressor, per critical race theory.

Finally, there are the most widespread practitioners of illegal, immoral, and unhealthful medicine: the PBMs (pharmacy benefit managers). These are middlemen in the supply chain of prescription medications who take the largest piece of the health care pharmacy dollar and yet produce no value for patients. In fact, they harm patients.

Your doctor may know the best drug for your condition but must prescribe what the PBM authorizes, which is the cheapest and least effective (lowest risk). By substituting their allowable drug rules for your physician’s judgment, they practice medicine (illegal), break the fiduciary connection (immoral), and force you to take the wrong medication (unhealthy).

Americans: Beware of bureaucrats and politicians practicing medicine, using COVID-19 as an excuse. Such practice is illegal, immoral, and hazardous to your health.