BY KATHLEENE PARKER
White Rock

Legislation will be considered, when the state legislature convenes, that is emblematic of why New Mexico continues, endlessly, at the bottom of the heap when it comes to so many things, in this case, medicine. 

New Mexico’s medical system—from the experience of this patient with a dangerous, potentially fatal, and long-undiagnosed auto-immune disease—is broken, doing outdated medicine, treats many patients appallingly, even abusively; has many doctors untrained in current treatments or in real diagnostics—though they are adept at ordering profitable-for-medicine tests or blaming the patient for his or her own illness.

More, New Mexico medicine, decade after decade, does nothing to reform itself. 

So, what are our state leaders considering? They, including Los Alamos’ own Christine Chandler, are proposing legislation to make it harder to sue doctors. The rationale?  Too many doctors are leaving the state due to high liability insurance premiums, they say, so apparently an exercise in social engineering will help.

While I too believe that major tort reform against New Mexico’s growth industry of liability lawyers is needed, this is not the place to start.

I speak from experience since—despite trapsing from doctor to doctor, from hospital to hospital—my well-known auto-immune disease went undiagnosed. When I finally, through my own sheer persistence, pinpointed a diagnosis, I was then confronted by a New Mexico medical profession uneducated about what the disease does and as unable to treat it, as they had been—for 31 years—to diagnose it!

So, as legislators prepare to hand the medical profession a mulligan, I ask, where is state leadership (decade after decade) to address:

• 1.      That the state-owned University of New Mexico Hospital struggles (based on national ratings by standards commissions) to meet even the most basic sanitation and safety standards for patients?
  
• 2.      That so many large for-profit corporations (that own many New Mexico hospitals and clinics) endlessly siphon profits out of state while often offering appalling and outed patient care and doing nothing to reform themselves?
  
• 3.      That so many New Mexicans, if they can afford to drag their bodies out of state, do so because they fear that here they won’t get proper diagnostics or treatment of cancer, auto-immune conditions or heart disease?
  
• 4.      That New Mexico doctors and hospitals are, almost universally, insisting (pretending?) that the diseases known in 1980 are the only diseases we know about today?  Yet, the mapping of the human genome (part of it here at Los Alamos), understanding of genetics, understand of the human microbiome and general advancements in medicine make a mockery of that.
  
• 5.      To ensure that young doctors are not being trained to focus only on what “most” patients have or only on disease that are most profitable for medicine to treat, but are instead educated to consider all disease and the pools of knowledge they can access to help their patients?
  
• 6.      To educate doctors to embrace patient symptoms and to not argue (a particular “favorite” of mine) with the patient about her symptoms and, more, to understand that, in an overburdened medical system, it’s important to get it right to begin with so that the patient isn’t endlessly recycled through the system without answers?

That I, a well-educated, eloquent woman could visit countless doctors, all utterly incapable (largely due to the reliance on B-12 testing, which yields huge percentiles of false negatives) of diagnosing pernicious anemia, a disease once a leading killer in the U.S. and still considered the 4th most dangerous auto-immune disease in the world, speaks reams about failed New Mexico medicine, as does that so many other New Mexicans face similar “challenges.” 

Let’s fix medicine, not remove or reduce patients’ only recourse—legal action–against a system endlessly without reforms.