Defensive Medicine, Pandemics, Politics, and Public Health
Claudewell S. Thomas, MD, MPH, DLFAPA, is an established psychiatrist who is currently retired ,, He received his medical degree in 1956 at SUNY Downstate College of Medicine and specializes in social psychiatry, public health psychiatry, and forensic psychiatry. Dr. Thomas was board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry... more
The CDC by a narrow margin has joined the WHO in naming Monkeypox as an pandemic. Monkeypox has jumped from 17 to 1720 countrywide in one day and now it's approaching 10,000 in the USA. Why the sudden onslaught of Public Health disorders? Why the simultaneous physical and institutional assault on Public Health personnel in the USA and worldwide? Does it remind you of the course of HIV progression in the 1980's? To me, there is a considerable measure of contempt and condemnation which brings into focus a need for federal or state oversight. The overturning of Roe v. Wade and the surge of trigger law states indicates that contraception, interracial, and same sex marriage are at risk.Thus, physicians of these populations are at risk.
Polio has re-emerged in Rockland County, New York, possibly from a foreign country. However, a re-vaccination program may be required. More traveling nurses? In what setting? More money for workers in present positions? What constitutes interference in treatment relationships? Defensive Medicine is a response to the conceptual morass on which we are intertwined with viruses, climate change, and confusion about levels of cooperation and agreement needed at state, national, and international levels.
