Rebekah Bernard
When you experience a medical emergency, you expect to be treated by a licensed physician with expertise in your condition. What happens when you look up from your hospital gurney to find that the doctor has been replaced by a non-physician practitioner with just a small fraction of the training and experience? From the co-author of Patients at Risk: The Rise of the Nurse Practitioner and Physician Assistant in Healthcare, the first book to warn of the systematic replacement of physicians, comes Imposter Doctors, an even more frightening exposé of patient endangerment at the hands of for-profit corporate entities and healthcare conglomerates. In the two years since Patients at Risk debuted, the employment of non-physician practitioners has continued to skyrocket. While advocates insist that nurse practitioners and physician assistants are ’just as good’ as physicians, they are wrong. Despite over fifty years of scientific analysis, there is no conclusive evidence that non-physicians can provide safe and effective medical care without physician oversight. In fact, recent studies have shown the opposite: that the replacement of physicians puts patients at risk. The only cure for today’s healthcare crisis is for patients to become informed about who is providing their care. We must all know the difference in clinician education and training, and demand answers from those who would deprive us of physician-led care.
