Doctor Found Guilty of Elder Abuse

URL http://literacynet.org/cnnsf/elderabuse/home.html

Summary

There was a case in Northern California that Dr. Wing Chin was condemned to elder abuse. He was sued by the patient William Bergman's children who assumed that Dr. Wing Chin didn’t use enough medicine to soothe their father’s pain leading to the fact that their father felt agonal in his dying days. William Bergman's children wanted to remind the society of this subject because of the increase of elder population. And the result was that the jury judged Dr. Wing Chin should award one-and-a-half million dollars to the patient's family.

thoughts and reflections

In the content it mentioned that the family members didn’t tell the doctor their father’s painful situation because they all believed in experts. It was a pretty awful thought. A doctor had many patients to treat so that he/she may ignore some minor but vital facts. Being family members, they should tell the doctor how hard their father suffered and discussed how to relaxed him even they are not professional. And they can also find another doctor to get some pieces of advices, instead of sitting beside the bed looking their father passed away with strong pain. Although they won the lawsuit, I thought they had other choices to make their father passed away sedately if they were not so passive.
Elder abuse is doing something or failing to do something that results in harm to an elderly person or puts a helpless older person at risk of harm. This includes
• Physical, sexual and emotional abuse
• Neglecting or deserting an older person you are responsible for
• Taking or misusing an elderly person's money or property
Elder abuse can happen within the family. It can also happen in settings such as hospitals or nursing homes or in the community. Elder abuse is a serious problem in this country. All 50 states have laws against elder abuse. The laws differ, but all states have systems for reporting suspected abuse.
(Quoted from http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/elderabuse.html)
From the information above, we could see elder abuse involves a variety of aspects. On one hand, it is hard to find victims if the elders are constrained in the house or nursing homes. They may suffer from mental or physical abuse and have no way to call for help even unable to call for help. In this way, nobody will know that until someone find it by chance or it might be a secret forever. On the other hand, it is difficult to judge when it involves in professional part like the story I found in CNN Interactive. It will take a long time for the jury and the judge to know whole thing, and it will be less efficient to deal with this matter.
Floridisation is a big problem in modern society. The higher rate of old population becomes, the more concern we have to pay on. While we are conscious about it, our government seems not to make a perfect law about elder abuse because we are not completely in this form of society, and we will be in the near future. Therefore,we have to build a complete law to protect the elders from being abused as soon as possible.

self introduction

Hello, my name is Isabella. I graduated from Changhua girl senior high. I like thrillers, and I always see that kind of movies or fiction at leisure. My favorite fictionist is Giddens who was used to posting his works on the internet. Sometimes I suspected he had multiple personality, because there were big contrasts in his works. I’m glad to be admitted to such a big and beautiful university-NCU. And I hope that we'll be good friends in the future~