The Hippocratic Oath: Privacy

The sixth and final covenant of the Hippocratic Oath is called Privacy. My oath states: That whatsoever I shall see or hear in regard to the life of my patients I will keep inviolably in confidence even beyond the patient’s death.

This ethical law is hugely important when a patient visits a doctor.  Remember here that nobody really wants to see a doctor if they aren’t sick. But pain, fear, and suffering become powerful motivators that instinctively propel patients to doctors when emergent sickness arrives. There is no substitute.  

A good doctor is a good listener and someone you instantly bond with as you describe your sickness. And rapidly, with that doctor at your side, he or she starts to make you feel better, and you love it. Here’s a little secret. That makes your doctor feel better too. That’s why he or she does the job. The result is that you have rapidly made a sincere personal friend who is there to help you get well as soon as possible, and you recognize that you need to help in making the process happen, and trust fuels the struggle.  

Now in 2024, our culture has drastically changed, not so much with emergent sickness, but with nonemergent or elective doctor visits. Here, the notion of privacy goes out the window.  There’s a proverb that states: When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out of the window. You could say that when skepticism comes in at the door, privacy goes out the window, and when that happens, the patient heads for the closest exit.  

The doctor has become a small part of the “healthcare team” that rushes you through the process called encounter, and herds you along to the next step without explanation. This system doesn’t care if you understand or not, and a good doctor is not an endangered species, but an extinct species based on the environmental impact of Gavin Newsom and his regime, and on his dirty political collaboration with monopolistic big business in getting doctors out of the way. 

A thorough history and physical examination requires a complete dismissal of modesty in any way. You are there to get well and back to full tilt, and I will guarantee that an ethical physician has the same goal. A good doctor is an amazing listener and investigator, interested only in your complaints, and who thoroughly examines your body in a search for abnormal or pathological anatomy, also called physical findings. I will let you know another little secret.  A well-trained doctor has seen it all. Nothing you can present will in the least bit shock a good doctor. That’s why trust is so important, and it is cultivated by privacy so you can find out the best treatment program to safely help you.  

The culture now demands that doctors don’t invade your privacy. Hogwash! Ethical well-trained physicians, paid in full for the services rendered, know best. The doctor knows best, and exactly how to set up the environment for you to lay it all bare, both physical and mental.  No secrets, no inhibitions. And nothing goes out of the confines of that exam room, except to your sacred medical chart with God’s approval.  Anything leaving that doctor’s office without your and your doctor’s agreement is malpractice, and a breach of the oath.

Medical education and training are national, such that a physician can go to any town in the nation to practice medicine and surgery. That means that if I trained at UC Davis, I could easily practice in Arizona, and know exactly what Arizona doctors and hospitals do. It’s universal, and that’s good for patients. That’s why the notion of “the buck stops here” is so important when you go to a good doctor.  If that doctor doesn’t feel comfortable, he or she knows exactly what kind of help is needed and then makes it happen. A high proportion of the time, that physician does not need ancillary help to get you well rapidly.  That’s because medical and surgical training was meant to make all doctors certified to handle any illness you can come up with and that standard has traditionally been the case. The decisions are the responsibility of the doctor and the patient, and both accept the results of the ultimate responsibility of those decisions, which are supercharged by trust.

Have you heard the term federalism? In simple terms, when considering the power vested in the US Constitution, decentralization of that power is the most essential element of a free society, ultimately bestowing to you and I that power so that we can make the best decisions, privately.  In the case of the doctor and patient, we have a nationally trained physician, which demonstrates the most competitive and  first-class treatments available right in that doctor’s exam room. That nationally derived power and wisdom is right there for you and your doctor.  That’s called federalism in medicine.  This is another aspect of ethical privacy that helps define adherence to or betrayal of the oath. 

Nowadays, the paltry amount of time a “doctor” spends with you is necessary to determine diagnostic codes called Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes which are electronically fired off to thieving third party payors, including “healthcare insurance companies” and Gavin Newsom. Not too long ago I went to an indoctrinated, government controlled gastroenterologist for colonoscopy. As a general surgeon, I know exactly what that physician’s job is, and am quite disappointed if I detect anything less than spectacular performance. It brings up profound trust issues and danger to my God given body, which I am fully responsible for.

So, in a kidding fashion, my burned-out gastroenterologist twiddled all 10 of his fingers in the air and said to me, “If you’ve got 10 of these, you can be a gastroenterologist.” I always demand to read the procedure notes from which doctors crank out CPT codes which are fired off by clerk subordinates to central command and control. Same goes for pathology reports, sent in by the CPT code adherents called pathologists. That’s called statism or federalization.  There’s a CPT code for examination, a CPT code for a biopsy, a CPT code for anything a physician would do and hopefully get paid for. And so many of the fundamental procedures that doctors used to get paid for are now denied. The gastroenterologist I have encountered  is truly a hopeless keyboard warrior and is very aware of what the cheating insurance companies and government are willing to pay for. This process overall is called nonsensical cheap cents,  and it makes no sense. It’s brazen greed, the characteristics of which are lying, stealing, and killing. The gastroenterologist has no choice in your medical and surgical care.

In 1996, a federal law was introduced called  the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). What hypocrisy!  You are told that your information is very, very private.  The government made it clear to you, by holding doctors’ offices to task.  Think about these words for a second. Portability?  That means that your private information, that between you and your ethical doctor, becomes public! Accountability? CPT codes that justify just how little the stingy third payor allows to pay the doctor?  

There is something else that patients just don’t understand but need to, and it’s called Explanation of Benefits (EOB), and it’s present on any invoice having to do with medical treatment you receive.  The bottom entry, called balance due is where the eyes of the consumer go immediately, which says “what’s the damage here”?  If that number is $00.00, as it often is, that document hits the round file.

If one took the time to look through the EOB document, the crooked insurance company, including the state and federal government, let you know how much the doctor charged, and how much that doctor was paid, which brags to you just how much that rip-off saved you.  What it doesn’t tell you is just how much money the jackals added to their bank accounts at your and your doctor’s expense.  It’s the classic combination of price gouging and price fixing, all right in front of your unsuspecting nose.

There’s another example of cost savings, which is a good thing, that happens when you shop for groceries at a Grocery Outlet as opposed to shopping at Raley’s or Safeway. They let you know on the invoice how much you saved on the expenditure of your disposable funds.  Same product, less price. That’s common sense and common good cents.   

Now add to your medical information your financial information. It’s all right there, your assets, liabilities, and financial standing. It’s all there for the harvest. Internet connection equals hack. Your privacy, both medical and financial, is the feeding grounds of greedy crooks!  

Privacy is fully breached. Newsom and his devious Medi-Cal, Medicare, ETNA, Blue Cross,
Blue Shield, Dignity Health, Sutter Health, Kaiser, UC Davis, etc. all know everything private about you now, and your healthcare laborers are snitches and don’t even know it. You have  no privacy. Electronic medical records and billing is a hack of any dollars you hope to keep in your hands, and any good health you hope to maintain in this broken system. Think of it this way – Privacy in Newsom’s healthcare world is nothing more than isolation and control of your mind and your pocketbook, and crippling you of the opportunity to talk your treatment protochol over with your friends and family. Outcomes are dictated by monsters who care nothing about you except to execute you so they can keep more healthcare dollars for themselves.

So now I  have hopefully defined for you what these six sacred covenants of the Hippocratic Oath represent, and a comparison of what adherence to all or breach of even one will cause.  Quite simply, the success of medical or surgical intervention hinges on whether we treat each other ethically with God-derived standards, or negligently via man-derived standards.  Outcome is 100% based on the stress laid upon treatment and prognosis.

Here in California, Gavin Newsom and his tyrannical regime have breached all six.  It is time for us to do something (a lot) about it.

The fundamental four questions are posed here as with all the other covenants one final time:  

• Is medical care affordable?
• Is medical care competent?
• Is medical care satisfying?
• Is medical care safe?

Get involved, get motivated, and help all the rest of us who want good ethical medical practice, better than ever before here in California, because it is you who will decide the future history of the medical profession.  

How can you help?  Rally up fellow freedom warriors, share Newsom’s tyrannical regime with those hopeless doctors out there, and offer those doctors a better way to do business. With you!  No more government and special interest rip-offs. I will absolutely guarantee you that if you let many thousands of California doctors know that you understand the process of the  monsters stealing our medicine, you will win them back and free them up. And you will be making some amazing friends. Now is the time for action. Now is the time for the doctor-patient bond.  Step up Californian, this  is war for our freedom of medicine.  We need the healers on our side.  Convince them!