The Art of Complaining. Phil EdmonstonЧитать онлайн книгу.
from doctors and patients for over five years, resulting in between 88,000 and 140,000 cases of serious heart disease. Merck had sales revenue of US$2.5 billion from Vioxx during its last year on the market.
Success Story
Another physician known as “the guinea-pig doctor” kept his job, but made himself sick to prove the medical establishment and pharmaceutical industry wrong about the cause of stomach and intestinal ulcers.
Barry Marshall, an Australian internist and medical researcher, was so sure conventional medical wisdom was wrong about the cause of stomach ulcers that he swallowed a broth of Helicobacter pylori bacteria to prove his point. Sure enough, the brew gave him an ulcer that a regimen of antibiotics quickly and inexpensively cured.
Both Marshall and Dr. Robin Warren, a pathologist who also saw the connection between H. pylori and ulcers, had previously been dismissed worldwide as quacks by medical specialists and drug companies. After all, medical schools taught that ulcers were caused by stress and lifestyle and were best treated by drugs blocking acid production. In one bizarre study they cited, scientists gave rats ulcers by putting them in straitjackets and dropping them in ice water. Antacids were given to prevent the rats’ ulcers. Based on this study, conventional treatment of patients became a lifelong diet of antacids like Tagamet and Zantac (a $3-billion-dollar industry) or removal of the stomach. Today, ulcers are easily cured with a short-term course of drugs and antibiotics, and stomach cancer, also linked to H. pylori gastritis, has been practically eradicated in the Western world.
Twenty years after their discovery was published, both doctors received the 2005 Nobel Prize for medicine.
Success Story
Manitoba firefighter Rick Stoyko was never much of a complainer, but he needed medical help for himself and his colleagues.
He met Becky Barrett while she was going door-to-door campaigning for the provincial NDP. Stoyko had been diagnosed with brain cancer in January of 2002 and wanted Barrett’s help in having cancer recognized as a work-related illness for provincial firefighters. He showed her studies of Canadian firefighters that found they were three times more likely to contract brain, bladder, and kidney cancers, as well as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and leukemia. She agreed to take up the firefighters’ cause.
Barrett won her seat and was appointed minister of labour. Shortly thereafter, she introduced Bill 5, a law making firefighters automatically eligible for workers’ compensation benefits for different forms of cancer, retroactive to 1992. The law created the presumption that a firefighter’s cancer was work-related. Under the new law, employers wishing to appeal had the burden of proof that the cancer was not work-related.
In a surprise move, the opposition Conservatives applauded the legislation, and Manitoba became the first Canadian jurisdiction with full presumptive cancer legislation. The list of cancers now presumed to be work-related injuries for full-time, part-time, or volunteer firefighters, as well as fire investigators and trainers, include breast cancer (a first in Canada), multiple myeloma, primary site prostate, and skin cancers. This brings to fourteen the number of cancers covered by presumptive legislation. The other cancers currently covered include: brain, kidney, lung, ureter, colorectal, esophageal and testicular cancers, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and leukemia.
Stoyko brought the media to tears during one press conference where he spoke of his love for the profession and how he hoped in his next life “to again have the honour of being a firefighter.” Rick died almost ten months after the legislation was adopted. He was only fifty years old.
The health protection law for Canada’s firefighters that Rick Stoyko and Labour Minister Barrett successfully championed in the Manitoba legislature has steamrolled around the world, as the following excerpt from Australia’s September 2, 2011 Senate Hansard clearly shows. The Senate was considering a health protection bill for Australian firefighters and invited Alex Forrest, president of the United Fire Fighters of Winnipeg and Canada’s representative for the International Association of Firefighters, to speak:
It has been a great honour to be here. I would like to dedicate the work that I have done here to a firefighter from Manitoba. He was the first firefighter to be covered by occupational cancer in all of Canada. His name was Rick Stoyko. I know his family will be happy to hear that dedication. I have also reviewed the previous Hansard from all the people. I believe that the evidence is clear. I am not going to go into anything more because I think the position has been clear that there is a link between cancer and occupational firefighting. You have the great responsibility of putting this forward and I really look forward to the report. I also look forward to the time that I come back here and see that this legislation is passed. I want to thank each and every one of you for putting your time into this. I know politics is a thankless job sometimes, but the work that you are doing here is going to have far-reaching effect for not only Australian firefighters but around the world. I know because I am working in places such as Sweden, Finland, Israel and the UK and they are watching what is happening here in Australia right now.
The Australian bill was passed.
Success Story
Beckie Williams combined the use of social media and a sense of humour to end U.K. retail giant Marks & Spencer’s practice of adding a $10 surcharge to brassieres sized DD and up. Her campaign created a Facebook group called Busts 4 Justice in 2008. A year later, with over 18,000 members, the group forced M&S to adopt a one-price-fits-all policy. Since then, a number of independent websites have sprung up rating brassieres and retailers’ practices (see busts4justice.com/about-busts4justice/ and www.investinyourchest.co.uk/ratings-guide).
Success Story
Marie Valée was a mom and a journalist for Le Jour, living in Quebec, when she became fed up with TV commercials directed at her children that pushed cereals, games, and other products. Her polite entreaties with advertisers got nowhere, so she wrote a few articles and ratcheted up the pressure. Valée founded a group of several hundred Quebecers called “Le Mouvement pour l’Abolition de la Publicité Destinée aux Enfants” and carried out a media campaign that culminated in hearings in the Quebec National Assembly and the adoption of strong laws that led to the abolition of advertising directed at children throughout Canada.
Success Story
Mario Girolami is a volunteer driver who parked his truck in downtown Calgary on May 19, 2011, to deliver aid for Slave Lake fire victims. His engine was running, and he had the emergency lights on for the few moments it took to unload bedding and other items. As he was pulling away, a Calgary Parking Authority agent handed him a $315 parking ticket. Girolami called the Calgary Sun, showed where he had been parked, and handed out copies of the ticket. The Sun’s “Page Five” picked it up. The upshot? The next day the ticket was cancelled, and the two Parking Authority bosses responsible were fired over their actions.
Success Story
Georges Zeliotis was a seventy-three-year old Quebec retiree who needed several hip operations and was placed on a hospital waiting list for treatment. After a year-long wait Zeliotis asked if he could pay to have hip surgery through a private health care facility and if he could buy private health care insurance. The Quebec government answered with a resounding non!
Zeliotis found Dr. Jacques Chaoulli, a Quebec physician who provided medical services to many of his patients at their homes. For several years, Chaoulli had been unsuccessful in getting the Quebec government to cover the costs of the home medical treatments he provided and to grant him the right to establish a private, autonomous hospital.
Patient and doctor teamed up and fought the Quebec government’s refusal all the way to the Supreme Court after having their case tossed out by two lower courts. In June 2005, in a four-to-three decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the plaintiffs and against the Quebec Charter of Rights, writing, “Access to a waiting list is not access to health care.”
The successful lawsuit allows patients to be treated privately in Quebec and has opened the door to private clinics throughout Canada. Waiting lists remain but provincial healthcare facilities have to keep the waits reasonably short or pay for treatment elsewhere.