All doctors know that there are good doctors and bad doctors. We refer our patients to good doctors, to help them get good medical care; and we try to steer our patients away from the bad doctors. However, we usually turn a blind eye to some of the malpractices other doctors indulge in , such as over testing ; unnecessary surgery; or irrational prescribing, because we feel it's none of our business. This is why most patients feel that doctors are engaged in a conspiracy of silence, where they end up protecting the bad doctors, even when they commit an egregious medical error.
This is often done out of a misplaced sense of professional solidarity, because we feel that we shouldn't be ratting out on another doctor. However, just because he's a colleague doesn't mean we should behave like Gandhiji's three monkeys, who never see any evil, hear any evil or speak any evil ! Most of us feel…
