From the New England Journal of Medicine, When Doctors Become Terrorists. A fascinating article by Simon Wessely, M.D. about both the history and motivations that drive doctors to be terrorists. Definitely worth a read, as it’s not the sort of thing that would come onto a lawyer’s radar in the normal course of things, but important to break out of our assumptions about phsicians and terrorists.
And no disgusting pics of internal body parts with circles and arrows.
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How sad that the NEJM should succumb to the predictable left-wing dribble about how “humanity” –not individuals (or radical, but widely held religious beliefs)–is to blame for the ‘coincidence’ of doctors being terrorists. A more mature, even-handed, and prudent position would be to acknowledge that radical Islam is a real and grave danger to societies everywhere. As my upcoming book “Jihad and American Medicine” (Greenwood Publishing Group, November 30, 2007) points out, health care serial killers (or terrorists, if you’d like) have been active in Western society for a long time; our job as medical professionals should not be to explain away the new threat of religiously-motivated madmen, but to identify those safety and security weaknesses which could be exploited to create disaster and claim innocent lives.
Whether or not that lib rag, the New England Journal of Medicine, has succombed to left-wing dribble is one question, but your comment fails to address the issue at hand: Why do so many docs become terrorists?
The docs involved didn’t bomb hospitals, which appears to be the subject of your book. I can’t say for sure whether terrorists will be targeting hospitals, since I have no idea what terrorists have planned, but I can’t imagine hospitals to be a very desireable target since they won’t get enough “bang for the buck.” In light of that, your efforts may appear to some as self-serving fear-mongering. Everybody thinks their personal target of issue is deserving of the world’s attention. Perhaps you’re just one of the pack.
SHG
As my research points out (Department of Homeland Security, FBI, FBI agents, other government sources of information, etc.), hospitals have been/are (sadly) potential targets by Al Qaeda–you don’t have to dig very deep to reveal this information. Frankly, if roadside cafes, shopping malls, office buildings and the like are suitable settings to murder innocent people, it’s not a stretch to realize that medical institutions represent a very vulnerable ‘soft underbelly’ to our open, free society. After my experience on 9-11, when I personally observed doctors of Middle Eastern origin literally cheer as the planes were shown to hit their targets (on the operating room lounge television in an East Coast inner city hospital replete with many doctors practicing on ‘work VISAs’), I vowed to devote personal time to the writing project which later became my book. My goal was to reveal those safety and security weaknesses inherent to our health care infrastructure which could be exploited by people seeking to do harm. I didn’t know then that doctors like those I observed would choose to use the health system to kill, only that I wanted to help define ‘gaps’ in safety mechanisms so that it would be harder to manifest evil in the medical setting. As it turned out, the same vulnerabilities which set us up for terrorist infiltration and attack within the medical system are also many of the same ones which lead to preventable medical errors (that claim upwards of 100,000 lives per year in the U.S.A. alone). To answer the question you pose about why doctors become terrorists, the reason is simple–because they can: i.e., evil people exist in all settings, religions, races, professions,etc; healthcare professionals who happen to be evil–or follow evil edicts/beliefs–have access to a large array of potentially lethal drugs, compounds,chemicals, biological agents, and even nuclear materials. It is for this reason that we need to take a hard look at the healthcare setting and do all we can to prevent the next disaster from ever taking place!
“health care serial killers (or terrorists, if you’d like) have been active in Western society for a long time”
Which is it — serial killers or terrorists? Most serial killers are not terrorists, and most individual terrorists are not serial killers.
Interesting that there would be a comment that asks ‘serial killer or terrorist?’…My book is not an FBI manual on the psychological make-up of ‘perpetrators’, but it is a fascinating subject and a good point. I have two brief comments to share, although there is a lot to be said about this subject. One is that I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Samuel L. Jackson a few weeks before sitting down to begin writing this book–I was doing a favor for a magazine editor friend of mine. As I describe in one of my early chapters, I asked the famous actor about his upcoming film at that time, “Snakes on a Plane.” In phrasing my question, I used the word terrorist instead of gangster to describe the main villain in the film and Mr. Jackson corrected me on my error. He was right (the character was not a terrorist), but he also missed the point of my question, which was about the possibility of unconventional ‘terror’ in airplanes at a time when people were already squimish about flying. From the standpoint of safety and security in the healthcare setting, an important take home lesson would be for us to understand the weaknesses that have already been exploited by the ‘serial killer’ types so that these channels of mischief would be harder to utilize by potential terrorists. My book is about 300 pages, and–amongst other things–details the many other ways that the health care infrastructure could be exploited to do harm. In my research, I befriended a few FBI agents/directors and received quite a bit of encouragement from them to keep going; as one of them said, “…glad to see someone is covering this necessary area of homeland security.” As I describe in my Introduction, I lived through the 2002 Washington, D.C. ‘Beltway Sniper’ ordeal and, despite the relatively low number of casualties over the course of a few weeks, that whole area was essentially paralyzed with fear. People were afraid to take their kids to soccer practice; I was afraid to take my family with me if I went to the gas station to fill up, etc. In the same way, poisons, counterfeit drugs, contaminated IV fluids, etc. could all be used to terrorize the health system even if the absolute number of victims is low!
Based on that logic, preschool should be the primary focus of our homeland security. There is nothing that would have a more devastating impact on the American psyche than the slaughter of children, and I know of no preschool that has fortified itself with the necessary precautions to prevent a terrorist attack. Indeed, they don’t even have the minimal security of magnetometers in place. They are ripe for the picking.
But then, that’s not the subject of your book (which I’m sure all my readers are rushing out to buy even as I type), so what do you care about the death of thousands of America’s innocent babies.
Lol jihad