‘Don’t trust your patients’: What Larry Nassar’s boss gets very, very wrong
Earlier this week, Larry Nassar's boss said some disturbing things about whether doctors should trust patients. Here's what he got wrong. Really wrong.
The concept wasn’t new to me: “The most basic lesson in medicine, medicine 101, that you should have learned in your first week: don’t trust your patients.”
I was reading a story in the Wall Street Journal, published earlier this week, about how a culture of doctors distrusting patients, and distrusting female patients, allowed Dr. Larry Nassar to abuse athletes in his care over many years. The quote came from Dr. William Strampel, Nassar’s boss and the former dean of the Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine, and it is something he said in a meeting about an unrelated male student accused of abuse.
As I
