We show up at a motor vehicle accident. A young lady has rear ended another vehicle. Her airbag didn't deploy, there is no visible damage to either vehicle, but she is a woman who has her seat adjusted so that her chest is only a couple of inches from the steering wheel. She is complaining of chest pain. She has no other complaints or visible injuries.
She doesn't want to be transported because she has no health insurance and cannot afford the $1000 ride. Our fire department protocol demands that we advise her to be transported by ambulance because of the mechanism of injury... she was in a car accident. Further complicating things is her complaint of chest pain. This is something we take very seriously. The paramedic on-scene starts telling her that she must be transported because even though her neck doesn't hurt, it still could be broken and she could be walking around tomorrow and become paralyzed. She is still not buying that, so to let her go we have to get her to sign a release of responsibility. For that we have to get a base station doctor's approval.
We get on the phone with the base station doctor. We tell him she doesn't want to go. He wants to talk to her. He parrots something else the paramedics have been telling her. That chest pain she is feeling might not just be from her breasts hitting the steering wheel. She might have damaged her heart. She could die from one of the big vessels being torn loose and suddenly rupturing, or she might have bruised her heart and that could cause some sort of arrhythmia which could cause her heart to go into fibrillation or just stop beating all together. So we with the doctor successfully scare her into taking an ambulance ride to the hospital. We put her head in a C-collar, and tape and strap her to a backboard. Of course she gets triaged at the hospital and ends up spending two or three hours strapped to that very uncomfortable board. They finally X-ray her and send her on her way with a $1000 bill from the ambulance company and a $1400 bill from the hospital.
What were the chances that this person really had a broken neck? I'd guess around ten million to one. What are the chances that she had actually damaged her heart? Probably the same ten million to one. Did the doctor and paramedic lie to the young lady to get her to comply with protocol? There is no question about that. Did they lie? You might have to analyze each word in a court of law to satisfy some people, but in many cases in my view they cross the line from exaggerating to lying fairly early on if the patient looks like they are not going to cooperate.
The incident you refer to is disgraceful and if that is the norm it is outrageous.
Our paramedics were loathe to have a person sign a release if they truly believed they needed medical care but the base stations doctor was not required for the patient to sign the release. If a persons judgment was impaired by drugs or alcohol and they clearly needed further care a LEO could arrest to enable them to be transported however I never personally saw that happen.
If ER’s are that hard up for business something definitely needs to be done and if the paramedics exaggerate or lie action should be taken against them also.
I’ll only qualify this because I don’t know your circumstances. Our paramedics were fire personnel, not private ambulances and I never once saw them lie or exaggerate in hundreds of incidents.
Both your comments are enlightening, and from a recent experience I don’t doubt that at least sometimes there is exaggeration or even coercion by medical professionals for one reason, money. I took an elderly neighbor to the emergency room because she had been dizzy for some days and then fainted. I am not a medical person, was this a stroke, a heart attack, or just maybe she wasn’t eating right? But to be safe, I called 911. An ambulance came with 3 paramedics and tons of equipment which they hooked up to her, all seemed very professional. In a manner of minutes they seemed to determine it was NOT a heart attack or stroke, but due to the fainting she should go to ER. In the ambulance more things were done, such as certain hook-ups to fluids and monitors. I followed to the hospital and the diagnosis was simple dehydration. Of course the paramedics did the right thing to turn her over to the ER. But the ER nurse started pointing out all sorts of things to me that were completely unnecessary, many different tubes and things they used in the ambulance. I asked why on earth would they do it, as a safety precaution? He said, no, they already knew it was not necessary for her, but this way the bill will be about $1000 more!