LiveUthing

Every one of these was done to people like you by a careful doctor following the rules. 1915: healthy teeth pulled by the mouthful, then the tonsils, to cure arthritis and madness. It was the standard of care. 1925: X-rays aimed at babies' chests to shrink a gland that was a perfectly normal size. The cancers turned up decades later. It was the standard of care. 1935: mothers drugged through labour, strapped to the bed with their heads padded, and sent home with no memory of the birth. It was the standard of care. 1940: electric shocks through the brain with no anaesthetic and no muscle relaxant, strong enough to fracture the patient's spine. It was the standard of care. 1948: premature babies kept in high oxygen as routine. It blinded about 10,000 of them. It was the standard of care. 1955: women in Irish maternity hospitals had the pelvis sawn open in labour in place of a caesarean, and were not asked. It was the standard of care. 1970: the whole breast, the chest muscle and the armpit removed for a lump a smaller operation would have dealt with. It was the standard of care. 1985: newborns given open-heart surgery awake, paralysed so they could not move, with no pain relief, because babies were held not to feel pain. It was the standard of care. None of it was fringe. A doctor who refused to do any of those could be sued for negligence, and the expert witness against him would have been quoting the textbook. Standard of care describes what everybody is doing. It has never described whether it works, and the two get compared about once a generation, usually at an inquiry.