From my America Out Loud Pulse podcast with Kelly Sutton, MD – https://www.americaoutloud.news/are-medical-boards-helping-or-hurting-patients/
The patient-physician relationship is supposed to be sacred, as Hippocrates explained thousands of years ago. Medicine has entered a brave new world of third parties (insurers) telling us what to do. Various laws, particularly in California, are squelching choice for patients and free speech for physicians even with threats of loss of their licenses. Consequently, patients are losing their choice in medical treatment.
In June 2015, California passed a law, SB277 that removed the personal and religious belief exemption from mandated vaccines. Without the 15 to16 vaccines,, a child cannot not attend public schools or day care facilities. In September 2019, California went a step farther to squelch medical vaccine exemptions with SB 276. This applied to private as well as public schools.
Prior to the enactment of SB 276, state law permitted physicians to issue medical exemptions based on their independent medical judgment. Now a State Public Health Officer is the final arbiter. The state will review all medical exemptions at schools where fewer than 95 percent of students are vaccinated, from doctors who submit five or more exemptions in one year and from schools that haven’t shared vaccination rates. The state will cancel waivers written by doctors who are under investigation by the medical board.
The State has the power to revoke the exemption if it decides the exemption is “inappropriate.” Talk about inserting a third party smack dab in the middle between physicians and their patients. If the state determines a physician is “contributing to a public health risk,” it will report the physician to California’s medical board.
The laws are designed to crack down on physicians “practicing outside the accepted standard of care.” But they also target the parents who believe it is their right to make medical decisions for their children. The term “anti-vaxxer” is a pejorative description of concerned parents and physicians who question the “science.” I think Covid-19 taught us more than we want to know about the perversion of science.
Mandates rely on coercion rather than informed consent. Clearly, a parent is left in an untenable position: Vaccines or pull their child out of school. Most parents – if both are working – do not have the ability to homeschool their children. Moreover, this could only be the beginning of the erosion of individual patient rights. We have a major controversy over the appropriate treatment of minors who have decided they want to be the opposite sex. In some states schools have the right to withhold gender issues from the child’s parents. Parents have lost custody of their child over treatment choices that could have life-altering consequences. In some states, schools do not have to inform parents about an abortion of a child over 12 years old.
The silver lining? Medical tyranny has gone so far that more and more patients and physicians are becoming activists.
Bio
Kelly Sutton M.D. completed residency in Internal Medicine and some Pediatrics, and practiced family medicine for almost fifty years, using knowledge from conventional and integrative medicine. She practiced until her medical license was revoked for writing eight vaccine medical exemptions by the state of California in 2022, and by Massachusetts and New York in 2023 based only on reciprocal discipline. There were no patient complaints in any state, and no patient injury. Dr. Sutton is challenging this revocation in court.
See www.reclaimingmed.org/drsutton for this story, its relation to other doctors’ experience with regulators, and their legal cases.
