Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Frist is Out

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WSJ reports  that Bill Frist is not running for President.  He said he wanted to return to medicine, quick everyone hide your cats. He said he wanted to take a “sabbatical from public life”.

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  1. the video recorder.  I think people should deluge him with videotapes of their warts, limited range of motion on those shoulder troubles, and some greenish sputum.  He can hook you right up with a diagnosis.  ;^

      • I have no problem with doctors running for president (Dean, ahem), but they should be at the very elast competent doctors.  Frist’s diagnosis-by-long-distance-mind-meld of Terri Schaivo is pretty good proof that he’s more politician at heart than doctor.

      • saw the writing on the wall on the Presidential campaign (Kerry should do likewise BTW, and fast!).  He never ruled out going back into politics, but he pretty much gave us one of those “I want to spend time with my family” lines in bowing out. Probably a smart move on his part.

      • No one here thinks physicians are declasse.

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        The problem is he’s a physician who committed an egregiously unethical act in disputing Terry Schiavo’s medical condition based on an hour-long, spliced-together video in an effort to exploit a dying woman for partisan political purposes.  Shall we relive that moment?

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        Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), a renowned heart surgeon before becoming Senate majority leader, went to the floor late Thursday night for the second time in 12 hours to argue that Florida doctors had erred in saying Terri Schiavo is in a “persistent vegetative state.”

        “I question it based on a review of the video footage which I spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office,” he said in a lengthy speech in which he quoted medical texts and standards. “She certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli.”

        His comments raised eyebrows in medical and political circles alike. It is not every day that a high-profile physician relies on family videotapes to challenge the diagnosis of doctors who examined a severely brain-damaged patient in person.

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        Indeed. In person for more than 15 years.

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        I can go and retrieve the autopsy results that corroborated that, indeed, Schiavo was in–and had been in–a chronic vegetative state for years and that she was blind due to the fact that her cerebral cortex and much of her remaining brain tissue was, in fact, nothing but gelatinous liquid?

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        Frist’s behavior was unforgivably unethical and irresponsible.  You wouldn’t want to hear what my former clinical colleagues (after having worked 16 hears in primary care) had to say about his “diagnosis”–Democratic and Republican physicians alike. 

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  2. Perhaps this announcement proves that he has learned from experience and gotten better at diagnosing persistent vegetative states.

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