By: Bharani Padmanabhan – Nov. 2019
In order to provide the intellectual pretext for the takeover of the profession of medicine by conglomerates and the destruction of physicians committed to their patients and profession, Lucian Leape fabricated the fake dogma that doctors are just like pilots and must also be turned into compliant, replaceable, cogs.
This fake dogma consciously ignores the plain fact that patients are not engineered aircraft, all interchangeable in the standard socialist fashion, as fungible as the doctors assigned to treat them, wherein it matters not if you don’t see the same doctor every time because the electronic chart is all we need.
The crash of two Boeing 737-8 MAX aircraft proved this dogma to be as much a fraud as Leape himself, but I expect this lesson to be concealed. The Lion Air crash report has been released. Good luck reading about it in a “care quality and patient safety” rag.
The 737 MAX did not behave as expected from the manual. Why? Because Boeing said “Information or procedures not directly related to airworthiness or not under the control of the crew must not be included, nor must any procedure that is accepted as basic airmanship.”
Meaning 737 MAX pilots were more like doctors than they realized. They had to deal with something that did not come in the manual, you know, like the patient that just walked in. And the pilots crashed the plane.
All the CRM and non-disruptive compliance with checklists did not save the passengers. The black box recorded the pilots going through checklists. There has been a deafening silence from Atul Gawande on this point. After all, what checklist does he have for individual patients who have no manuals?
Turns out that just the day before the crash this particular patient, the Lion Air 737 MAX, had shown the same behavior that was not in the manual. That time the cockpit contained a third pilot who helped the two regular pilots deal with something not in the manual, and they did not crash the plane.
The report states: “The flight crew of the previous LNI043 flight took around 3 minutes and 40 seconds after 12 MCAS activations to come up to the solution of the problem by performing stabilizer trim cut-out, while in the accident flight the flight crew did not manage to find the solution.” “The FAA and OEMs should re-evaluate their assumptions for what constitutes an average flight crew’s basic skill and what level of systems knowledge a ‘properly trained average flight crew’ has when encountering failures.”
Ah yes, basic airmanship. Wait, you mean preventing plane crashes actually depends on the professional skills of individual pilots? And with different pilots you get different results? Wow, who knew!
Now, given that the pilots just the day before had successfully solved the same problem that was not in the manual, you would think that would have been broadcast far and wide within Lion Air at least, if not the wider 737 MAX community.
Nope. When the pilots handed off the MAX the day earlier, they did not even mention the solution – cut out the trim switch – because it was not in the manual! It was not on any checklist! And pilots have long gone from independent members of a profession to a Joe Punch-Clock. Any burned-out physician would perform better than a product of pilot training schools.
No fortress has ever fallen to the enemy without a man on the inside. When it comes to the fortress of the medical profession, the enemy within were Leape and Gawande bearing models and false gods. The fortress has fallen, but medicine still hasn’t sunk as low as piloting, yet. Medicine can still, and must, be saved. ◊