You cannot fight the establishment. I was the victim of a predatory surgeon - as were several others. We found each other online. We could do nothing. He hired a PR company to push out positive publicity about himself. This was private, but NHS is the same. He had the best legal team and we were powerless against them.
They close ranks, they lie, they exploit their power. It is a closed little club of professionally incompetent bullies.
They will NEVER admit wrongdoing as it opens up the way for you to sue successfully.
All you can do is write online reviews on sites that allow you to name and shame, like complaintsboard and ripoffreport.
Do not be intimidated by threats of libel - it is only libel if it is not true.
Do go to the press. But as far as formal complaints and justice.....forget it
A friend of mine was treated negligently during surgery - three times, each further surgery to correct the original one. She couldn't work for a couple of years, nearly died and eventually sued the surgeon after hearing from some of the nurses that he'd done the same to others. He 'lost' her notes. This meant everything she said was questioned, it was a huge stress to her to compile her claim, she had both surgeons and lawyers in her family who backed her up, but even so it went on for about two years. The surgeon in question agreed a token compensation, which she accepted rather than go to court. The GMC weren't interested and the man is still practising at a couple of local NHS hospitals and private ones. I pass his name on to people I meet if I hear of them needing similar surgery and warn them to steer clear of him. However it is very difficult to win against such a person and I don't think he apologised at all. In fact there are certain professions in which you're told never to apologise.
A nurse told me of another surgeon who had killed several patients through negligence. His 'punishment' was to work only under supervision, so he simply moved to a different area and carried on as before. The nurse said she always wanted to warn patients when she heard they were being treated by him but couldn't.
That said, my GP has apologised for not working out what was wrong with me and for not being able to treat me, and recently for not being able to prescribe ERFA as I had normal blood test results years ago when first diagnosed privately.
I don't think that the Masons, as a whole, are necessarily a part of this. I think it's more that any group or organisation of like-minded people will help each other, especially if any fall-out would reflect on them all, and a profession such as medicine, with high salary, esteem, inflated egos etc. and everything to lose, is one of the largest groups of such people. Then within those groups you get the ones with super-inflated egos!
I got an apology from a GP once. I'd had a very off the cuff remark from the doctor about an operation I'd had. To me it was devastating, but the GP brushed it off. I wrote him a very long letter explaining how the lead up to it had ruined my life. I got an apology which went on for 40 minutes. But it was pre-internet and nothing was written down, so in the long run it did me no good.
Also - a different time, a different problem, and a different GP - when I was 13, I had a very serious, life-threatening, and excruciatingly painful health problem that is classified as a medical emergency (when it is correctly identified that is). It took nearly a month for me to be admitted to hospital and for the problem to be operated on. My GP actually came to visit me in hospital. He didn't apologise (in so many words). But how many people have ever been visited in hospital by their GP?
Funnily enough, an old GP of mine visited me in hospital to apologise profusely for being cross with me for just turning up at her surgery with my very sick baby - I think she thought I had been making a bit of a fuss over nothing but, after a very quick look at my daughter, got us admitted to hospital asap.
I had a letter of apology from my ex-family GP who hadn't opened a letter advising of abnormal smear. 9 months later the new GP practise I tranferred to arranged for me to be seen by a Gynae within 2 days. The Gynae phoned the ex GP and tore him off a strip while I listened. The diagnosis was cancer but it hadn't spread so I didn't need invasive surgery.
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