Technology

“WHY DO YOU ROB BANKS?”

Patients Kept Nearly Dying at a Texas Hospital. No One Suspected an Inside Job.: How dangerous doctors keep slipping through the system—and how you can protect yourself. (Brent Crane, Nov 22, 2024, Men’s Health)

A disturbing reality was beginning to take shape: Someone at the North Dallas Surgicare center was tampering with those bags.

CLINICIDE REFERS TO doctors who intentionally cause a patient’s death during treatment. It was coined in 2007 by Robert M. Kaplan, a forensic psychiatrist in Sydney, Australia. Though the term is relatively new, the phenomenon is old. One of the first documented cases was that of William Palmer, who poisoned several patients in mid-19th-century England.

Other grim notables include Harold Shipman, a British general practitioner who is thought to have murdered as many as 450 patients in the late 20th century, and Michael Swango, M.D., an American who killed 60 patients in several U. S. states, Zambia, and Zimbabwe between 1983 and 1996.

Nurses have also been prolific killers. In fact, one 2006 study of serial murder by health-care professionals, published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, found that nurses accounted for 86 percent of the prosecutions of these cases.

The personality types and profiles of perpetrators are myriad, but these people all do harm under the cover of care. The authors of a 2020 paper in the British Medical Journal were blunt: “Arguably, medicine has thrown up more serial killers than all the other professions put together.”

Varied as the psychological motivations behind clinicide may be, “the critical issue is the power doctors hold over life and death,” says Kaplan. Psychopaths, like Shipman and Swango, use the thrill of killing to overcome their inner emotional numbing, and there is also “a gray zone for those with massive hubris who will not accept criticism of their work and see themselves above the issues affecting their patients,” he adds. All of this raises the question: How can we, as patients, trust that our doctor is not one of the bad ones?

In America, there are systems that are supposed to weed out the rotten apples. In 1986, Ronald Reagan signed into law the Health Care Quality Improvement Act. This enabled the formation of the National Practitioners Data Bank (NPDB), a federal database of physician disciplinary, malpractice, judgment, and conviction reports. It was intended to prevent dangerous doctors from jumping from state to state and to provide legal protection for those reporting negligent colleagues.

How is it, then, that nearly four decades later, the problem of lethal health-care professionals persists? That they can rampage through reputable facilities like the Baylor Scott & White North Dallas Surgicare center? One reason is that the average health-care professional is simply not on the lookout for malicious colleagues. “Medicine is messy, and you don’t always get the results you hope for or your patient hopes for,” says Kaplan. “So there’s a great degree of tolerance for adverse events. That takes you a long way before somebody starts thinking, Damn, is he deliberately killing these people?”

PATIENT, HEAL THYSELF:

“Honest” placebos: Sugar pills can work even when you know they’re fake (Rich Haridy, February 22, 2025, New Atlas)

A fascinating study published in 2018 found patients suffering from cancer-related fatigue displayed significant improvement in their symptoms after being given an inert placebo. All the subjects were told at the beginning of the trial that the pills they were given contained no active pharmacological ingredients, yet a notable placebo effect was still detected. The research was just one piece of evidence in a compelling body of work suggesting “honest” placebos could play a role in certain kinds of clinical treatments.

It’s all in your head…

HARSHING THE SINOPHOBE MELLOW:

What sparked the COVID pandemic? Mounting evidence points to raccoon dogs (Smriti Mallapaty, 2/21/25, Nature)

One of the reasons raccoon dogs were suggested as a prime candidate early on is because they were probably involved in passing another, related, virus to people. In 2003, researchers isolated close matches of the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in several civets and a raccoon dog at a live-animal market in Guangdong, China.

This finding prompted researchers in Germany to investigate these animals’ susceptibility to SARS-CoV-21.

They found that raccoon dogs can be infected by SARS-CoV-2, and — despite not getting that sick themselves — can pass on the infection to other animals.

Studies by Holmes and his colleagues have also shown that farmed and wild raccoon dogs in China are often infected with many viruses that can jump between species. “Raccoon dogs are very common viral hosts,” says Holmes.

Many of the first cases of COVID-19 involved the Huanan market, suggesting it was the location of the viral spillover. SARS-CoV-2 sequences from the first infected people, in late December 2019 and early January 2020, along with geolocation and epidemiological data, support this2.

During the outbreak, the market was shut down by the authorities, but researchers know that raccoon dogs were being sold there, for their fur and as food. In June 2021, a study described the results of monthly surveys of live wild animals sold across four markets in Wuhan between May 2017 and November 2019, including seven stalls at Huanan3. Every month, an average of 38 raccoon dogs were sold at these markets. The most-sold species was the Amur hedgehog (Erinaceus amurensis) at an average 332 individuals a month. Masked palm civet (Paguma larvata), hog badgers (Arctonyx albogularis), Chinese bamboo rats (Rhizomys sinensis), and Malayan porcupines (Hystrix brachyura) were also regularly sold.

December 2019 sales records from the Huanan market also list trading of live animals or products from bamboo rats, porcupines and hedgehogs, among others.

Further evidence to support the raccoon-dog theory came in 2023. Chinese researchers published genomic data of swabs taken at the Huanan market in January 2020, after it was shut down, including of stalls, rubbish bins and sewage4. Studies found mitochondrial DNA of raccoon dogs in several swabs, including those that also tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. Raccoon dogs and hoary bamboo rats (Rhizomys pruinosus) were the most common mammalian wildlife species detected in the mitochondrial DNA; material from civets and hog badgers was also found but not in many samples5. The findings don’t prove that the animals were infected with SARS-CoV-2, but had they been infected, this is the type of evidence you would expect to find, says Andersen.

…and Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK.