falsehood
1 : an untrue statement : LIE
2 : absence of truth or accuracy
3 : the practice of lying : MENDACITY
men
I agree with your other points, but is Jen’ai really “famous for treating foreigners”? Foreigners go there because they’re forced to do so to get medical exams, but most of the foreigners I know who get sick hie themselves off to other medical institutions (Adventist, TaiDa, Makai [can’t remember the English name just now]), don’t they?
Here’s a scary idea for you – medical related – I translated a paper a couple of years back which had a survey of nursing students, asking why they’d chosen nursing as a career. Only a ridiculously low number actually chose – the rest had parents who “thought it would be good” or said “well, it’s better than going into the army” (this was a guy, obviously), stuff like that.
I also caught part of a TV show the other night (on one of the 2 channels I can get with my pathetic little antenna!) where they were interviewing med students and asking the same question: why had they chosen medicine? Most said “Mom and Dad wanted me to be a doctor”; the other common reason was “my marks were good enough”. Added to the fact that medical school starts at age 17 or 18 here (I know, I used to teach at one!) – this scares me!!
I know the difference between an urban myth and libel. I also know that as an affluent expat WASP, the last thing I would be afraid of is a third-world hospital suing me for libel. Who cares if Juba gave an “unsupported and unjustfied” conclusion? We are talking about a hospital whose claim to fame is that they offer the cheapest health checks in town. I can’t believe you are taking this so seriously.
Mistakes? Picking up the wrong pair of glasses is a mistake. Marking that a guy is pregnant on a form with an obvious male name (and photo) is appalling. So is a health system that encourages blatant fraud and needless prescriptions. And what about injecting babies with the wrong vaccine? Oops, just another mistake I guess.
No, a falsehood is just something that is untrue - It may or may not be intended to deceive. You are equating “falsehood” with “lie,” but they are not exactly the same. If you can think of a better word to describe something that may have been thought by the person who said it to be true, but was in fact false, please tell us. I’ll let you have the last word on it, if you insist.[/quote]
negligent misstatement
The hospital owes a duty of care to the patient to conduct the test in a reasonably competent manner, that is to a standard that could be reasonably expected from a hospital laboratory. If they make an untrue or inaccurate statement which they should have known to have been untrue, and they did not know it to be untrue because they failed to exercise their duty of care, then that statement is a negligent misstatement, for which the remedy is a suit for damages. In English law that is. I would imagine US law is very similar, and Taiwanese law is very different (!) Negligent misstatement is a personal favourite of mine as legal aid (government assistance to non-millionaires) can be provided to pursue such a claim, whereas there is no legal aid for libel, nor (I think) for defamation.
No, a falsehood is just something that is untrue - It may or may not be intended to deceive. You are equating “falsehood” with “lie,” but they are not exactly the same.[/quote]
Sorry Juba, you’re wrong. I took the definition of “falsehood” from Black’s Law Dictionary, 5th Edition. As we are discussing “libel”, a legal term, I will stick to using legal definitions. If you want to make up your own definitions of words, go right ahead. I’m just trying to give you a friendly warning or “heads up” for your own good.
OK. How about a “mistake”?
Fine.
[quote=“hexuan”]negligent misstatement
The hospital owes a duty of care to the patient to conduct the test in a reasonably competent manner, that is to a standard that could be reasonably expected from a hospital laboratory. If they make an untrue or inaccurate statement which they should have known to have been untrue, and they did not know it to be untrue because they failed to exercise their duty of care, then that statement is a negligent misstatement, for which the remedy is a suit for damages. In English law that is. I would imagine US law is very similar…[/quote]
Yes, I think that is how I remember it from law school many years ago. The only twist in the above explanation, unless the law has changed, is that the “standard of professional care” that medical professionals can be held to in the US can vary. That is, if I suffer a heart attack in Rochester, Minnesota, I can expect a very high degree of care and skill from a cardiologist who is on the cutting edge of heart health research and practice at the Mayo Clinic, while if I suffer the same heart attack in Stick-in-the-Swamp, Louisianna, I can expect a rather lower degree of professional care and skill from the lone doctor there, a general practitioner who normally delivers babies and sets broken bones.
In any event, a negligent mistatement is not the same as a falsehood or a lie, and I know that you are aware of this. I think that “libel”, as discussed in this thread, in light of the fact that this is a message board, is important for people to understand.
Certainly nobody denies that medical malpractice is a gravely serious matter… but some people here are mixing the issues.
Yes, and that is an important distinction, because a negligent misstatement can be made by someone who genuinely believed it to be true, but did not do enough to verify the statement’s veracity. A malicious falsehood (heh heh let’s trot them all out…!) on the other hand, requires an intent to deceive.
OH well, no matter what, Ren ai Hospital is a meat market with a constant stream of cows going through there getting so called, “health checks”. Moo.
Few years ago during a blood test there, this wanker misjabbed my arm and copious amounts of blood spurted out (for about five minutes) and I was left with a bruise all the way down the inside of my arm…
Mistake? You bet! Did I get an apology? No way!
I hate them and all the other hospitals here. The way they treat patients is disgusting, unless of course you slip them fat red envelopes for their troubles!
And I wouldn’t even say that the inadequacy comes from the socialised national health care system, since my prime hospital experiences came in the days before the NHI.
Doctors and nurses have no bedside manner to speak of, mistakes galore in treatment and diagnosis occur daily, and I very much doubt that these ‘doctors’ are often sued for malpractice or taught anything about ‘ethics’ during med school.
It’s unfortunate that laborers and teachers are the only groups of foreign workers who’re forced to get health exams every year for their visas. It reeks of discrimination!
This is from a US CDC document (cdc.gov/STD/treatment/2-2002TG.htm#Syphilis):
“The use of only one type of serologic test is insufficient for diagnosis [of syphilis], because false-positive nontreponemal test results may occur secondary to various medical conditions.”
So, it’s easy enough to have a false-positive finding. However, the original hospital should probably have told your friend of the possibility of false-positive findings and offered additional testing. I wouldn’t expect teh additional testing to be free, though.
Keep in mind that false-negative results are also possible, so there’s no guarantee that your friend’s second test wasn’t wrong, unless it was a highly sensitive test.
Better not lose sight of the fact that Juba, as a Chinese-literate long-term resident of Taiwan, was interpreting the situation in the light of the widespread and well-supported belief here that many hospitals and clinics are run primarily (if not exclusively) as money-making businesses, with their administrators often putting pressure on doctors and other staff to extract as much money as possible from each patient by whatever means are available, regardless of ethics, honesty, or any other such considerations. This is a subject that has been very well aired in the local media over the years, especially in the more recent past. It’s hard not to be highly sceptical about medical practices in such an environment. It is an issue of great concern to civic groups, lawmakers, and government officials. In this context, it is not so unreasonable to draw a highly negative conclusion from the facts as presented to Juba by his friend. I probably wouldn’t have interpreted it as a “lie”, “untruth”, “falsehood”, or the like, but I would certainly have condemned the hospital for what was apparently yet another lamentable instance of shoddy practice.
But regardless of anything else, the conclusion that I’ve drawn from reading this thread is that when being tested for anything in a local hospital (and perhaps likewise in many other countries), it would be wise to have the test repeated at least three times by different hospitals or clinics to come anywhere near to being confident about the accuracy of the result.
Three hospitals, wise but not practical 
Practically you can do a little research on the internet and ask the doctor (if they know) what is the false positive and false negative rate.
See if they know what they are doing. Ask them to back up with another type of test.
Not all doctors are so bad here. I used to teach English to a very intelligent and kindly doctor who worked in an intensive care unit here who used to spend a lot of time on visiting his outpatients (he was from NTU though!)
Omniloquacious,
Please tell me more about the woman who died after childbirth. You can pm me or we can start a new topic.
J.
Jennifer,
Rather than start a new topic, here is the fullest account of the story in English that I’ve been able to find. It’s from the Straits Times.
TAIPEI HOSPITAL BUNGLES AGAIN
Ignored by frazzled staff, woman dies
Her family says staff were busy saving babies injected with wrong drug
By Lawrence Chung
TAIPEI - A woman in labour went into a coma and died in a hospital while the staff were frantically trying to save seven newborn babies given the wrong injection on Friday by an inexperienced nurse.
The dead woman’s baby, already delivered by Caesarian section, survived.
But despite being put on respirators and rushed to four better-equipped hospitals, one of the seven newborns later died. The others had regained consciousness yesterday, but one was still in the intensive ward.
The survivors are at risk of brain damage.
The dead day-old baby girl was the long-awaited first child of a Chinese Indonesian couple, Mr Lo Wen-hong, and his wife, Ms Lo Yueh-chan. She had miscarried before and this was her second pregnancy.
Her daughter, like the other six, was supposed to be given a hepatitis B vaccine. Instead, the newborns were injected with an anaesthetic and muscle relaxant that gave them seizures, severely lowered their blood pressure and weakened their heart beat.
The Pei Cheng Women’s and Children’s Hospital has admitted the mistake and expressed its deep apologies to the parents of the seven newborn babies.
Now, it also faces the fury of the family of the woman who died of delivery complications, Ms Huang Ling-yi.
They charge that she was given an anaesthetic at 8 am and then ignored till 3 pm, because the staff were too caught up with the babies.
After the surgical delivery, Ms Huang was put under intensive care, but it was only at 7 pm, said the family, that they were told she was in danger and had to be moved to another hospital.
‘My wife was left unattended for hours after she was given the anaesthetics as the medical staff were preoccupied with the injection mishap,’ charged the grieving husband, Mr Hsu Ken-yao, a military serviceman.
With tears in her eyes, Ms Huang’s mother-in-law said: ‘They told us that my daughter-in-law had to be transferred to another hospital for treatment after she delivered the baby. We never imagined that she will be gone forever.’
Doctors at the East Asian Hospital to which she was moved, said she was already in a coma and had no heartbeat on arrival.
Ms Lo sat clutching a baby pink outfit she had bought for her daughter and said: ‘I didn’t even have a chance to hold my baby girl. We had expected her arrival for four long years.’
Then she burst into uncontrollable sobs.
Twenty-one-year-old Huang Ching-hui is the rookie nurse at the heart of this tragedy. Instead of hepatitis B vaccine, she took the muscle relaxant atracurium from the fridge where both were stored. The bottles looked alike, said the hospital.
Physicians said that within 30 minutes of being injected with 1 cc of atracurium, a week-old baby will have breathing difficulties and go into a coma.
Doctors said that even after the surviving babies are discharged, they must be monitored for the next six months to ensure they do not get brain damage as a result of the injection.
Taiwan’s Health Department yesterday suspended the nurse’s licence. She is on an NT$250,000 (S$12,675) bail. The department has fined the hospital NT$150,000 for negligence, and said: ‘We are also following Ms Huang’s case to see if her death had anything to do with medical negligence of the hospital.’
But the hospital denies negligence in this case, claiming she died in labour.
Unofficial estimates say more than 80,000 clinical accidents happen in Taiwan each year and over 20,000 were due to negligence.
I agree with Juba. The hospital made a mistake and refused to own up to it. Period.
From a personal perspective, the medical institutions in Taiwan leave something to be desired. My doctor has prescribed antibiotics (worse yet, three days worth of antibiotics) to treat a common cold that was doing just fine with liquids and ginger tea and OJ. The doctor said to forgo the vitamin C and take some antibiotics instead. When I mentioned that a cold is caused by a virus and that antibiotics wouldn’t help, he helpfully reminded me that he was the doctor. The next time my employer tried to make me see a doctor about a stupid little cold, I refused. Her (and my own) tax money can be far better spent.
When a co-worker of mine was having his physical examination, the doctor did a “genital exam” which involved touching the poor guy’s genitalia. No one else I know has had to submit to such an ordeal, but then none of my other friends or aquaintances has had this doctor. My co-worker is normal and healthy, so what would possess a doctor to tell him to drop his drawers and have his parts handled, except possibly horniness on the part of the doctor?
Of course, misdiagnoses are made all over the world, every day and not only in Taiwan. But most people in Taiwan seem to hold the medical profession in such awe that they will never question the opinions of a doctor, and regard anything said by a doctor as factual. Since the doctors here are used to this subordination by patients, they often refuse to do second tests, referrals, et cetera. And the poor patients think nothing of it. Hospitals do expensive tests and procedures, and if they are wrong, that is the patient’s problem, not their own. But of course, they never do anything wrong, do they?
And Juba is just being ornery by mentioning it, isn’t he? Certainly if a HOSPITAL TEST showed that his friend had an STD, he has no right to question that, does he? Hospitals are always right, aren’t they? Tag questions are the wave of the future, aren’t they?
there was a pretty interesting piece about giving birth here in TT last Friday. Lots of c-sections, labor-inducing drugs etc. All done in order to make the doctors lives easier, instead of saving lifes.
Mr. He,
Do you have the link to the article in TT, I will go search it out, but thought if you had it on hand…
TIA
I am still a bit confounded after discussing this with my wife, who told me that natural birth makes women more stupid after having read the piece. (Proving her own point by claiming so - or that was my reply)
Mr. He…
Appalling stats huh!
Thanks for the link
Kristy
Taiwan needs a natural birth movement. It’s not that anastetics are bad, they can take a lot of the pain, but the c-sections, labor-inducing drugs etc have to be used with care and with the doctor’s focus on the highest possible survival rate of the mothers and their newborn infants. But yes, giving birth hurts - seen 2 of them myself.
Amen! Sign me up!