bad doctors shak000016.html

The following is from the book Reclaiming our Health by John Robbins published in 1996, HJ Kramer, Tiburon CA

Vitamins and food supplements are "unregulated," but are doctors who administer drugs regulated?

Early in 1974, a pregnant investigator for the California Department of Consumer Affairs, acting on behalf of the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance, dressed herself up as a hippie and went a number of times to the midwife-run Santa Cruz Birth Center. Then, on March 6, she called the center saying she was in premature labor, and pleaded with the midwives to come to her aid.

Although the midwives, Jeanine Walker and Linda Bennet, had been uncomfortable with this woman and did not trust her, they responded to her call for help. When they arrived, however, they were arrested. At the same time, police descended on the Birth Center, and were not only ransacking the place but also tearing apart the home of another midwife, Kate Bowland. In their zeal to find hidden evidence of misdeeds, they left no drawer or cupboard unsearched.

Seemingly unconcerned with expense, the authorities in Santa Cruz culminated a year and a half investigation by employing 13 persons and eight cars to arrest three women on a misdemeanor. The police report acknowledged the excellent prenatal care the pregnant female “special operative” had received while paid to represent herself as a client of the Birth Center for several months. Not mentioned was the fact that in the previous three years, the Birth Center had been involved with over 300 births with a zero percent mortality rate, while during the same time period more than 3 out of every 300 babies delivered by doctors in Santa Cruz County hospitals had died.

The midwives were freed from prosecution, but only after tremendous financial and emotional expense. They were out of business. Women were henceforth afraid to enter such a career.

In 1989 a San Diego male doctor admitted to copulating multiple times with an eleven year old girl. He was allowed to continue practicing.

In 1979, an obstetrician named Milos Klvana, MD, from Valencia, California, was found guilty of 26 medical felonies. He was allowed to practice eight years after the first of his nine murders of infants. Six of the babies’ deaths were deemed the result of the doctor’s deadly use of pitocin. Dr Klvana’s ultimate prosecution was for 9 counts of second degree murder and 38 felonies including insurance fraud, perjury and conspiracy. The California Board of Medical Quality Assurance was blamed by the Los Angeles Times for its repeatedly inept inquiry into the complaints against this doctor.

In 1992, a front page story in the San Francisco Examiner reported: "A San Diego doctor is charged with raping five patients based in part on complaints, some going back to 1983, filed with the state Board in charge of policing physician conduct, but never acted on."

In 1847, when the AMA was founded, midwives attended nearly 100 percent of the nation’s births. By 1915, the number dropped below 40 percent. By 1960, midwives were attending less than 1 percent of American births. In 1921, shortly after women had received the right to vote, a group of midwives and citizen reformers proposed legislation providing funds for childbirth education, prenatal classes, and better training for midwives. The AMA wrote in the Illinois Medical Journal that the bill was the work of "endocrine perverts, derailed menopausics, and a lot of other men and women working overtime to destroy the country."

During the 1960’s people were interested in learning how to live off the land, build houses by hand, grow food without chemicals, keep themselves healthy, and care for one another’s ailments in natural ways. With this emphasis on self-reliance and community spirit, midwifery fit right in. Naturally it was in California, where the counterculture movement was strongest, that the resurgence of midwifery began. It was also in California where the Medical Board committed the greatest acts of hypocrisy.

In the 1960’s, Santa Cruz medical societies ruled that obstetricians should not offer prenatal care or follow up care to any woman intending to have a home birth. No blood tests, no blood pressure, no attention would be available from medical doctors to expectant or recent mothers if they wanted a home birth. Midwives who formerly had a policy of engaging obstetricians at hospitals for patients with special needs were no longer able to do so.

No sympathetic physician could help. In 1975, Yale University Hospital issued a written policy that any doctor who attended a home birth would lose the right to practice medicine in a hospital. This regulation spread across the United States. Insurance companies refused to cover doctors or nurse-midwives who attended home births, even those who worked in licensed birth centers.


email Ben