A long time reader asked me to comment on this article – Wisconsin’s Real Doctors and Their Fake Sick Notes for Protesters

Here is the real issue.  We are asked by patients to provide permission or medications on a regular basis.  Almost everyone accepts our word on patients’ health status – insurance companies, employers, schools, etc. Our word helps patients receive disability status, including special parking places. Rarely does someone question our prescriptions (other than opiates).

What these doctors in Wisconsin have done undermines how everyone views physicians.

As physicians we have a right, and the same responsibility as any citizen to have and make public our political views.  We can lobby; we can protest; we can write letters to the editor.

But we do not have the right to manufacture medical information.  We have a sacred trust with society.  We should assess each patient the same regardless of politics.  To write sick excuses for protesters harms that trust.

Regardless of the political issue, these physicians did the wrong thing

After viewing the videos at my request last night, Dr. Arthur Derse called me up exclaiming, “Holy mackerel! It’s much worse than it looked in the paper. I’m stunned, absolutely stunned.” Dr. Derse is the Director of Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities a the Medical College of Wisconsin. “When all’s said and done, it’s really the profession of medicine that has the black eye in this case,” he says.

There is no question these doctors are masking political opinion in the white coat of the medical profession, Dr. Derse believes. “The videos are pretty damning.”