Huntsville Times weighs in on Griffith controversy

Patricia McCarter of the Huntsville Times has written a very fair and thorough representation of the controversy surrounding Parker Griffith’s peer review from the 1980’s.

Griffith had another whopper of a quote at the end of the article.  He said, “This has been out there for two decades…”  Actually, vague rumors and innuendo, which I previously discredited, have been around for two decades.  Substantive, specific reports about Griffith’s practice have only been out there for two days.

As for Griffith’s claim that no patient ever complained (a claim verified by the state) it is a curious response.  Note that he didn’t say that he did not engage in “sub-optimal” care as the survey, authored by a highly regarded doctor in the field, stated.  Griffith merely said that no one complained.  Well, based on the practices that the report describes one would not expect patients to realize they were receiving inadequate treatment and that there were justifiable grounds for a complaint.

I’ve never been affected by cancer personally or through my immediate family I’m fortunate to say.  But I can imagine that learning you have cancer is incredibly challenging to cope with emotionally.  I suspect there is that there is a feeling of very little hope, at least initially.  It is a state of mind that tempers your expectations for the outcome of treatments.  Griffith could have administered partial doses to all of his patients and they would be none the wiser.  In addition to their low expectations (relative to, say, a patient undergoing an appendectomy) they are likely not medical professionals trained in radiation oncology that could recognize the improper treatment.  They are easy prey for an unscrupulous physician.  If the treatments don’t work their first thought won’t be that the doctor intentionally sabotaged them; they will assume that the odds just didn’t work out in their favor.  That is the cruel nature of cancer after all, right?

Another of Griffith’s defenses is that the two men who reviewed his practice were hired guns.  The implication is that they were medical whores who would say anything in return for a check from the hospital.  This alone is a serious claim about two men who are FAR more accomplished in the field than Griffith.  As with expert witnesses in a legal proceeding, the scope of what they assess and the flavor of their findings could be influenced by their client.  However, there are numerous findings in the report that are not opinions or spin – they are direct statements specifying noncompliance with standard practices at the time and shoddy record keeping that hindered their ability to more thoroughly ascertain exactly what went on.  The inadequate record keeping is not a trivial finding because it can be an indication of someone trying to hide their actions.

Griffith wasn’t terribly charitable towards the judge who presided over his failed attempt to block the peer review which led to a vote to revoke his privileges.  He blamed the judge for not being “medically savvy” and not understanding how competition works in the medical field.  Translation: the judge was stupid.  He also said that reports such as the one in question “are ordinarily sealed because the public does not know how to interpret them.”  Translation: you and I are stupid.  If only we were all as smart as the great Dr. Parker Griffith!

BTW, this site provides general reasons for sealing documents:

The ”’public policy”’ of record sealing balances the state’s desire to free citizens from the burdens caused by the information contained in state records against the state’s interest to preserve records that may be beneficial to the state or its citizens.

Nothing about protecting citizens from their own ignorance.

Griffith offered up a technically correct statement about the conduct of the peer review that has left some of his supporters confused.  In an attempt to trivialize the findings he told Greg Privett of WHNT “I never met with Dr. Perez.” At least one of his supporters ran with that and proclaimed that he was never interviewed.  The fact is, though, that Griffith was interviewed by Dr. Luther Brady as part of a survey of the oncology practice, which is probably the more scathing of the two reports.  Dr. Perez’s peer review was more of an audit.  It involved him looking though records and making assessments based on what he could find.  Here’s where the shoddy record keeping comes back into play.

There remains the very serious questions of why Huntsville Hospital merely voted to revoke his privilege and not pursue the matter further.  Griffith would have you believe that it was a competition issue.  Clearly that isn’t the case based on the findings in the two reports.  I can’t say (nor do I allege), but I can imagine that they had significant incentive to keep this quiet.  While such information would clearly be damaging to Dr. Griffith (and any other doctors involved), which would satisfy the objective Griffith claims they had, it would also open the hospital up to a barrage of civil lawsuits.

Could this information open up Griffith (and others) to civil proceedings now?  I imagine that patients and relatives of patients will be hot for answers in light of this newly released evidence.  While it appears that the statute of limitations were long ago exceeded there is something called the Discovery Rule:

Sometimes it is not reasonably possible for a person to discover the cause of an injury, or even to know that an injury has occurred, until considerably after the act which causes the injury. For example, an error in the drafting of a will might not be noticed until the will is being executed, decades after it was drafted, or a financial planner’s embezzlement might not be noticed for years due to the issuance of false statements of account.

When it applies, the “discovery rule” permits a suit to be filed within a certain period of time after the injury is discovered, or reasonably should have been discovered. The discovery rule does not apply to all civil injuries, and sometimes the period of time for bringing a claim post-discovery can be short, so it is important to seek legal assistance quickly in the event of the late discovery of an injury.

Maybe a helpful lawyer can chime in and explain whether this (or some other rule) applies here.  Even if it doesn’t, can we expect to see a group of patients and their families coalesce prior to the election and demand that Griffith address their concerns?

More to come I’m sure.