Cancer Victim Plans Crusade for Removal of ‘Bad’ Doctors
Despite a recurrence of cancer, medical consumer advocate Paula Carroll is about to launch, between chemotherapy sessions, a letter-writing campaign in her crusade to drive bad doctors out of business.
“It makes me more determined than ever that we have to seek reforms within the medical profession,” Carroll says of her medical setback. “It has not daunted my fervor or enthusiasm one bit.”
Carroll, 54, was a self-described meek and unquestioning housewife 10 years ago when she agreed to a mastectomy to remove a cancerous tumor. The doctor told her he removed all of the cancer. He didn’t.
Learned of Mishandling
The following year she had to undergo thyroid surgery and she says it wasn’t until she sought help at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center that she learned her Merced doctors had mishandled her case.
Angry at being misled, she filed a complaint with the Board of Medical Quality Assurance, the state agency that oversees physicians.
The BMQA spent more than a year studying her case--she says the agency “dragged its feet”--and then ruled there was insufficient evidence to punish her doctors. That just made her madder.
Since that time, Carroll has become a citizen gadfly to the board, helping disgruntled patients around the state file more than 150 claims with the BMQA in cases in which they believe they’ve been mistreated, or in some instances, butchered.
In 1981, she founded the nonprofit Consumers for Medical Quality Inc. and began developing one of the largest laymen’s medical libraries in America. She also started a greeting card program for rest-home residents and an emergency medical fund for local poor families.
Carroll and her husband, Steve, operate a successful home security alarm business and have poured more than $100,000 into their reform efforts. She fields up to a dozen calls a day from consumers wanting information on how to find a good doctor or how to file a complaint with the BMQA.
She has been honored by a number of civic and professional organizations, including the California Trial Lawyers Assn.
In April, 1986, she published an account of her struggles with the medical profession titled “Life Wish” and went on an exhausting promotional tour for the book, conducting dozens of television, radio and newspaper interviews.
The book is now in its second printing but sales were hurt, Carroll says, when actress Jill Ireland, also a cancer victim and the wife of actor Charles Bronson, came out a few weeks later with a book bearing the same title.
Last year, the California Senior Legislature, an elected group of California elderly who meet in Sacramento once a year to recommend bills to the real Legislature, adopted her five-point reform program as a top priority.
Reforms Outlined
Her reform program calls for opening up hospital morbidity and mortality records to consumers; making public BMQA records on physicians who are drug abusers or alcoholics or who have been disciplined; requiring physicians to take relicensing examinations every five years, and setting license fees based on a physician’s malpractice record.
Although state lawmakers are usually eager to carry bills backed by the Senior Legislature, not one legislator during the election year of 1986 would back Carroll’s proposals, which are opposed by the California Medical Assn.
Carroll, frustrated by the CMA’s political clout, planned to launch a petition drive this year to get her reforms on the ballot as an initiative measure. Then a few weeks ago she learned about her cancer recurrence.
The cancer, she says, was embedded in the scar tissue of her mastectomy and that scar tissue, ironically, had acted as a protective sheath to prevent the cancer from spreading. Surgery to remove it was, doctors think, successful.
But as insurance she must undergo chemotherapy sessions into 1988 followed by radiation treatments. Because her strength has deteriorated she has dropped her initiative plans and lecture tours and is choosing instead to mail packets explaining her program to supporters and interested consumers.
Foone Louie, legal counsel for the BMQA, accused Carroll in a newspaper interview last year of carrying out a “vendetta” against the board.
But in an interview he told United Press International, “I would say that all crusaders are always welcome whenever they can help a licensing agency. If Paula Carroll can help us do that, wonderful.”
Louie complained that the BMQA has only 50 special investigators to probe consumer complaints against the state’s 65,000 doctors. And he says 25% of those 50 positions have been vacant for several months.
Carroll is not the only BMQA critic.
The Center for Public Interest Law in San Diego says few of the bad doctors in California are ever weeded out--less than one in 1,000--despite considerable evidence that as many as 10% of doctors nationwide may have drug, alcohol, senility or other impairment problems.
