Woman Is Dragged From Hospital And Dies Shortly After In Jail For Not Being Able To Walk (VIDEO)

Everyone's of course blaming the hospital, but in truth its not their fault, nor is it the police departments.

The reason she was treated as she was was indicated in the Hospitals statement here:

Hospital: Mom booted from ER who died in jail was treated appropriately
”The sad reality is that emergency departments across the country are often a place of last resort for many people in our society who suffer from complex social problems that become medical issues when they are not addressed. It is unfortunate that it takes a tragic event like this to call attention to a crisis in our midst.”

They are politely indicating to you that she had a record of being a drug seeker.
Pain killers would not have prevented blood clots anyway, so even if they had given her what she was screaming about, she would still be dead now.

The policy about drug seeking DOES NOT come from the medical field, it comes from legislation of your government. The government goes after medical people for anything that they consider “unauthorized” distribution of narcotics, and will actually arrest doctors for distributing them against the governments policy. Medical folks are always having to balance between what the patient needs, what the insurance company says that the patient needs, and what the government will allow. The problem is that two out of those three people aren't even assessing the patient in person, to see what they actually need, and really need to butt the heck out of it.

We just had this happen in our building today.
One of my patients told me there was an altercation going on in the hallway, which had carried out there from another office. The person would not leave, was making a scene, and finally the police had to be called in to remove them. Once the police showed up, of course, they fled with the police hot on their heels.

This stuff goes on all the time...

Its not unusual for people to call in ahead of time and try to tell us what drugs they expect to receive, and then threaten to not come if they don't get a promise to receive them. Of course we have to dismiss them from practice, and if they show up, we have to call the police.

Again, this stuff goes on every day...

Heck, I was walking into a CVS a couple of weeks ago, and almost was run over by some guy running out in the opposite direction with the pharmacist chasing after them. When I got to the counter, I asked what that was all about. Come to find out that it was someone trying to turn in false scripts for drugs. It was there second time in that store in 24 hours, and CVS had it marked in their computer that he was going store to store, trying to get his fake scripts fulfilled.

So with that in mind, how is this the fault of the medical people who have to deal with this on a daily basis?

The first hospital already ran an ultrasound that showed nothing on it.

Insurance companies, even medicaid, will not pay to run the same test over again when it was negative a number of hours earlier. Now if there is something suspected, and the person is under observation, then that is a different story and they may be able to run the same test over, but that's not the case here.

It's already been found that the hospital was not at fault, and acted within their procedural policy. Those policies are set by the Hospital, but have to meet certain government set criteria to be legal and the Hospital to be accredited. From the hospitals perspective this person had already been cleared by another hospital, and was now simply there demanding pain meds.

There is even a term for this in the medical profession, its called “doctor shopping”. When she showed up at the second location, asking specifically for pain medication, she fell right into the criteria of a person who was out “doctor shopping” for pain meds.

They do...
Its called medicaid.
If you walk into a hospital with no insurance, they will apply for it for you.
That was not the issue here.

The issue here was that she went to three different facilities, each time showing up with new “props” (crutches, wheelchairs), and asked specifically for pain meds, after the first hospital discharged her with no problems they could find. That showed the final hospital a pattern of “doctor shopping”.

Again, even if they had done as she asked, or even admitted her, we would have the same result. There is not much they can do about a pulmonary embolism once heading for the lungs, and pain killers won't do a darn thing to help anyway.

Even if the third hospital had run test they would not have found anything.
She died of a pulmonary embolism, the symptoms of that are shortness of breath, not leg pain.
I highly doubt that a clot can travel from your leg to your lung in that amount of time anyway. My father died of blood clots (pulmonary embolism) secondary to cancer, and it took long periods of time for them to move from place to place. If she died that quickly after being taken from the third office, she was already in trouble, the clot was too far along to do much with blood thinners, and they would have found nothing in the leg (unless there were multiple clots). This is probably why the first hospital didn't find anything either. If you go in and say my leg hurts, they're going to check your leg, not your chest.

Sometimes its just someones time to go, and there's not much that the hospital could have done but code her at that point. I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that they end up finding that she had pancreatic cancer, and didn't know about it. Pancreatic cancer does not normally show any signs until its so far progressed that there is nothing you can do about it, and death from it actually comes in the form of clots that cause heart attack, pulmonary embolism, and stroke.

People sometimes give modern medicine too much credit for what it can accomplish, believe me, if you ever go work in the field you'll be shocked at exactly how little we can often do.