Clinic blows it on both ends of crisis

To the editor:

I am outraged by the negligent, reckless methods employed by the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada. My husband’s physician referred him to this facility for a colonoscopy last year. Since we were not offered a choice of where to go, we assumed it was a safe, accredited clinic; our primary physician sends all his patients there exclusively.

As soon as we stepped up to the check-in window on the day of surgery, payment was demanded for the cost of anesthesia and our insurance co-pay. After paying hundreds of dollars for this procedure, I really feel my husband was entitled to his own clean, unused syringe. (I was also not impressed with the assembly-line atmosphere where patients are herded in and out like cattle, but that’s another story).

After reading about the clinic’s dangerous practices and the resulting spread of hepatitis C, I called the endoscopy center to get more information about the hepatitis and HIV tests that the health department is recommending former patients immediately receive. I was told by a curt employee to call the hot line number. I tried calling the hot line number for hours; it was always busy. (Hint: If you are planning on having 40,000 angry, frightened people calling you, you may want to invest in more than one phone line).

I finally called back the curt employee at the endoscopy center and asked who would be paying for the blood tests (Why should the patient or his insurance company have to pay?), and was hung up on.

After this experience, I can only assume that the endoscopy center management has no intention of righting the wrong that they have created, and patients and their families are on their own. Class-action lawsuit, anyone?

Patricia Ducharme

HENDERSON

Responsibility

To the editor:

The scandal at the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada invites numerous questions about responsibility.

I have two: First, it appears that some staff refused to endanger patients’ lives, while others followed orders and knowingly put patients at risk. I’d like to ask why no one in either group, over a period of at least four years, thought to come forward and blow the whistle? Why, oh why, didn’t any employees notify the Southern Nevada Health District? Were they afraid of losing their jobs? Well, now those jobs are gone, along with the trust and good will of the public.

Second, I want to know where Dr. Dipak Desai has had his own screening colonoscopies performed. If he used his own clinic, were staff instructed to employ the same cost-saving measures on Dr. Desai as they did on ordinary patients?

Ellen Shaw

HENDERSON

Revoke license

To the editor:

In your Sunday newspaper, Dr. Dipak Desai says in a full-page ad: “In cooperation with the Southern Nevada Health District and other health agencies and officials, we have carefully reviewed our procedures and implemented the changes they recommended.”

Wow. Is he trying to say he didn’t know what was going on at his clinic?

And now he encourages everyone to get tested. Does he own any testing centers in town?

This man needs to have his medical license stripped from him now. If he needs the health district to tell him not to re-use syringes, not to use single-dose medication on multiple people, how to sterilize his equipment and who knows what else, he should not be practicing medicine.

Carol Tassoni

LAS VEGAS

Lousy rhetoric

To the editor:

I was disappointed to read Scott Peterson’s Saturday letter in support of the Yucca Mountain Project. Not because I disagree with him that anti-Yucca rhetoric is often overblown, but because his rhetoric is no better.

He notes that “last week’s earthquake … was a greater distance from the Yucca Mountain site than Cleveland, Ohio, is from Washington, D.C.”

I see no reason why this distance helps us in deciding about Yucca Mountain. Is there an appropriate distance for earthquakes — perhaps that from Roanoke, Va., to Washington? Or from five miles east of Cleveland to Washington? More importantly, did we as a society discuss and agree to what that distance should be?

Until advocates and opponents of nuclear power (including nuclear waste management) talk meaningfully about what we should assess, no amount of science, however good, can inform our decisions.

David M. Hassenzahl

LAS VEGAS

THE WRITER IS CHAIRMAN OF UNLV’S DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES.