By William K. Black
Patient bleeding out? Don’t treat the bleed; keep the crash cart nearby
Imagine you were a doctor in the ER when a patient was brought in presenting symptoms indicating a likely internal bleed. Here are the two critical questions you face.
- Would you (a) find and stop the bleed or (b) wheel the patient off to a “recovery” room with instructions to alert the crash cart to be ready to try to revive the patient should he go into cardiac arrest due to the continued, untreated bleed?
- If you chose option (b) in response to the first question, would you tell them to (a) use the crash cart that is known to be most effective, or (b) use the experimental prototype crash cart that has never been used successfully to revive a patient suffering from a cardiac arrest triggered by an untreated bleed and that most physicians think employs a methodology that is inherently incapable of reviving such patients?
If you picked option (b) in response to both questions, congratulations! Your patient may have died and your career in medicine may be over but you have demonstrated that you are the very model of the modern chief economist of the IMF, OECD, and ECB. Your initial salary in those positions may not dwarf your income as an incompetent physician, but the financial industry loves to make wealthy the “useful idiots” of the IMF, OECD, and the ECB and similar entities as soon as they leave what is termed “public service” (rather than “servicing the banksters”).
Continue reading →
