Open Letter to Dr. Turnbull of CMA

Dr. Turnbull

I am sure I am not the only one who thinks you need to look into the power structures within the medical practice. GPs trying to help their patients with MS have apparently been threatened by the various Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons across Canada if the patient is interested in having venoplasty done to relieve their symptoms. I say apparently because they will not go on the record for fear of having their livelihood taken away by these groups. It’s a kind of Catch 22 situation that neither the GPs nor the patients can (or possibly in the case of doctors) will be specific about. However, patients looking for aftercare for a venoplasty are most often turned down. Patients wanting to learn if poor blood flow may be their problem are routinely turned down. The various Colleges publicly say they will see that it is given but privately, they appear to do everything in their power to prevent it. I have seen this maneuver before. Not in medical circles but in legal cases – I used to work in a criminal law office. It is a maneuver often used by criminals as part of their various scams. Say one thing but do another, especially if there is no way for the average person outside of law enforcement to prove it. 

It would appear that the Code of Ethics is being rewritten to accommodate  a few doctors who’s power stems more from the money they have and can continue to amass doing nothing viable, than from the knowledge they should have. Medicine is no place for closed minds and it is certainly no place for common scams to be perpetrated on sick people who are desperate after 50 plus years of expensive drugs that apparently do nothing for the patient.

It also appears that there is a misconception, mostly found among our MS neurologists, that MS patients, because they are often hit with ‘cog fog’ are also innately unintelligent and stupid. This is definitely not the case. Just in case you do not understand ‘cog fog’, it is an inability to get the information one knows up front and deliverable at a specific moment in a conversation. It does, inevitably, come forward though quite often too late to use in that particular conversation or, should the other party know or think they know what one is trying to say, they will fill it in and the MS patient will recognize it as what they intended or recognize that it was not what they intended. Stupidity is not having the knowledge in the first place.

You really need to put help and compassion back into medicine, particularly for the MS patient who cannot get simple, less costly treatments that at least return some quality to their lives. You really need to remove the discrimination afforded pwMS – not every little thing that goes wrong with my body is automatically MS related. Treatments that are readily available to everyone else are refused to me and my fellow MSers.You really need to put a leash on the handful of doctors preventing us from having that quality in our lives.

Very Sincerely

Karen Copeland
MS Patient