Love Potion Number Nine: Online
The Associated Press reports that witchcraft has gone cyber. As the Inquirer points out, some Mexican brujos have websites, and while they take credit cards, they don’t take American Express.
I wonder if that will qualify them for a Visa Gold commercial. 🙂
One of these folks ‘fessed up a bit to the Associated Press:
Aguirre acknowledges that much of his gift has nothing to do with devils or saints and boils down to a talent at psychological manipulation. But he insists the work is for the good of his patients.
“All the acting is part of the cure,” he says. “You have to give people what they want, and what they want is to find evil behind things.”
Boy, does this guy know the Net!! 🙂
Another Kind of Hex
Some of you may laugh at the thought of Mexican brujos removing hexes from you, but some people just north of the border in Texas may find that they’re the only ones that will take them.
That’s because some real doctors in Texas are using the Internet to cast their own kind of spell on certain people, and if the story’s correct, it’s pretty hard to call it a good one.
The New York Times reports (free registration required) that doctors in Texas have set up a database in which anybody suing doctors for malpractice gets recorded, and suggests that other doctors “use the service to assess the risk of offering your services to clients or potential clients.”
At least according to the Times, if you sue, you go into the database “regardless of the merit of the claim.”
It goes on to say that “The American Medical Association said that it had just learned of the group and that it saw no ethical issues at stake.”
Excuse me?
They quote the chairman of the AMA’s board of trustees as saying, “There’s no question that physicians are totally frustrated by the relentless assault on the medical profession by trial lawyers. Is it fair to come to me if you’ve sued the last 10 physicians you’ve seen and never collected? Is it fair for me not to know that?”
There’s no doubt there’s some truth to what he says, but this database doesn’t answer that problem. Rather, it takes the “Kill them all, God will know His own,” approach to the problem. This was considered a bit over the top even back in the thirteenth century.
After all, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist or even a doctor to be able to figure out that a patient who leaves surgery with a scalpel sticking out of his brain is a little different than one with a nonexistent injury, and that even the nicest people might sue under those circumstances.
But I guess that’s too hard for doctors to figure out, and even worse, if they did, that would imply that doctors are actually capable of error. We can’t have that, so “Kill them all” instead.
Yes, it might be fair to doctors know whom the big medical frauds are, but wouldn’t it be even fairer to everyone not to assume that everyone who sues for malpractice must be a fraud, like the folks the legal system concluded were not only not fraudulent, but right? Or is there no such thing as malpractice, and it’s all fraud, no matter what anyone else says?
Fortunately, there’s a proven solution for those illegitimately on the blacklist with this kind of medical problem. It’s simpler and surer than trying to reverse some brujo’s spell.
Is there a lawyer in the house? 🙂
Be the first to comment