Please donate here:  https://www.gofundme.com/PHPReform

There is a very urgent need for a “counterpower” to state physician health programs (PHPs). On average five or six medical students, doctors or residents contact me each week.  They are usually afraid and many do not trust anyone in the system after what they have been through.  They have lost their locus of control.  Many feel hopeless, helpless and defeated.  I have recieved many wonderful letters thanking me for this blog and giving them support and guidance in maneuvering this system.  I want to be able to continue to do so and hope I can rely on your donation.

In terms of reform it is critical to create some type of due process or redress for putative impaired medical students (as well as physicians) who are the objects of state PHP therapeutic interventions. Currently there is no counterpower to PHP control.  No outside agency exists that can both investigate compliants and punish for wrongdoing.  We need to  form an advocacy group or intervention review organization with the goal of ensuring the veracity of both the claims against them and the purported diagnosis. We also  need to make certain that individual rights were not circumvented in the name of “help.”

Although it is difficult to stand up to “authority” it is essential that we do so.  Every voice counts and collectively we can change this system.

In the past year we have made some tremendous gains.  Pauline Anderson’s  Physician Health Programs: More Harm Than Good? opened the door to exposing the financial exploitation and abuse of doctors by PHPs and their preferred drug and alcohol testing and treatment facilities. This was the first mainstream medical new article to address the problems with PHPs. They have no oversight or accountability.  The FSPHP rebuttal  to Medscape Medical News  was dismissive and did not meaningfully answer any of the specific concerns.  Logical fallacy and half-truths were presented but the direct and substantive questions remain unanswered.  Ever since BMJ Editor Jeanne Lenzer’s  “Physician health programs under fire” was published in the BMJ there has been nothing but silence.

Multiple articles are in the works including an expose in a major news source to the general public. This will be a first!

Please help me continue to help others and continue to fight for reform.  I am losing ground very quickly and may not be able to continue after the New Year if I do not get some relief.  Please help me do so.–Michael Langan, M.D.

Please donate here:https://www.gofundme.com/PHPReform

Source: Medical Students and Physician Health Programs–A Modest Proposal to Medical School Administrators to Prevent a Potentially Impairing Catastrophe