Dr. Bowden's Defamation Suit Dismissed
Failure of the "SLAPP" strategy
Lawsuit filed by Houston doctor accused of spreading misinformation about COVID-19 dismissed (fox26houston.com)
The defamation suit filed by Dr. Mary Bowden against Houston Methodist Hospital has been thrown out of court. She must pay the defendants attorney’s fees and court costs.
Dr. Bowden has been a very outspoken critic of COVID vaccination and a proponent of the use of Ivermectin. Her opinions are not consistent with the medical literature which clearly and unequivocally demonstrates that the vaccines are safe and effective and ivermectin is ineffective.
Dr. Bowden was on the medical staff at the hospital but never admitted or treated patients there. Her medical staff membership was revoked for spreading false information about the vaccine and ivermectin, so she sued for defamation. How can the medical staff do that? By what right can they give a doctor the “boot” for publicly expressing an opinion that differs from the evidence-based peer reviewed medical literature?
Here’s how. When a doctor wants to join a hospital medical staff they must apply for privileges and be credentialed. That is the role of the “organized medical staff” which is a separate and distinct entity from the hospital. You can’t walk in and start treating patients if you’re not on the medical staff.
The application for medical staff privileges is an arduous process. There must be primary source verification of every educational program, medical school, and postgraduate training you have had, every position you have ever held. You are thoroughly scrutinized before a hospital medical staff will grant membership.
In addition to that credentialing process, there is also a “privileging” process whereby the doctor requests permission to treat patients and perform the procedures for which they are trained. You can’t treat just anybody or do whatever procedure you feel like doing. Your medical staff privileges spell out exactly what diseases you are qualified to treat and what procedures you are permitted to perform. You must prove your training and current competence.
Even after being credentialed and privileged, the new medical staff member must be proctored by senior medical staff members to be sure they are competent. In addition, the medical staff by-laws will typically require that the doctor practice evidence-based medicine consistent with guidelines and recommendations from recognized specialty societies. Deviation from those guidelines may subject the physician to disciplinary action including removal from the medical staff and loss of admitting privileges.
Why is that? Why does hospital medical staff do this? The answer is simple. It’s all about patient safety. The credentialing and privileging process assures that doctors practice within the scope of their training. This is why the doctor who treats your heart attack is a cardiologist not an Ob-Gyn. If a medical staff member ventured outside their approved privileges, they will be disciplined.
Dr. Bowden is an otolaryngologist and is qualified to treat patients and perform procedures within her specialty, also known as ENT (ear, nose and throat). In order to be an ENT, which is a surgical subspecialty, she must have completed a general surgery internship and an ENT residency. That’s her specialty, ENT and I presume she is a good ENT doctor.
She has no training in infectious disease which requires completion of an internal medicine residency and an infectious disease fellowship. Lacking that training, no hospital medical staff would grant her privileges to treat complex infectious diseases. You would not want a psychiatrist doing heart surgery or an oncologist delivering babies. An infectious disease doctor can’t do a radical neck dissection or sinus surgery. That is out of their scope. I don’t think anyone can argue against the merits of limiting doctors to treating that which they are trained to treat.
COVID is a complex, highly virulent and lethal infectious disease that has killed well over 1,000,000 Americans. Treating COVID is also complex and has undergone rapid evolution as new treatments were developed urgently. It is incumbent upon all physicians to rely upon their colleagues who are experts for guidance. For infectious diseases, we rely upon guidelines from authoritative bodies such as the Infectious Disease Society of America. We don’t “wing it” and make up our own treatment or adopt a treatment hyped on Twitter or Facebook.
Throughout the pandemic we have seen something truly remarkable - the emergence of COVID “experts” totally lacking in the training necessary to be a COVID expert. None of the doctors you have seen on social media or cable news decrying the vaccine and promoting hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are fellowship trained and board-certified infectious disease specialists. None would ever be granted privileges to do infectious disease consultations in a hospital. They aren’t qualified.
Like Dr. Bowden who is an ENT, the other doctors who have gained notoriety as antivaxxers include general practitioners, family physicians, a cardiologist, a pulmonary doctor, and Ob-Gyn, a doctor who never finished a residency program and one who never even did an internship and doesn’t even qualify for a license to practice medicine.
You would never see these doctors in a hospital treating seriously sick COVID patients, but there is nothing to stop them from going on TV and giving medical advice they are not qualified to give. That’s precisely what has happened. Doctors lacking training in infectious diseases on TV spouting off about the treatment of an infectious disease. Imagine how ridiculous it would be if, say a psychiatrist went on TV and was presented as expert in neonatology. Many have tried to alert the public to the spread of false information by unqualified “experts”, but that has not gone well.
These fake experts turned to the courts to retaliate. Just as Dr. Bowden filed a defamation suit against the hospital, other antivaxx doctors have filed lawsuits against individuals and organizations intended to silence criticism. These are called SLAPP (strategic litigation against public participation) lawsuits. They are intended to silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition.
Dozens of SLAPP lawsuits have been filed and they have worked, that is until today. For the first time that I am aware of, an antivaxx doctor who filed a SLAPP lawsuit had the tables turned on them. These SLAPP lawsuits are an abuse of the legal system. They are a form of censorship, fake experts silencing true experts. I hope the other SLAPP lawsuits currently in the courts will also be dismissed.
This is a freedom-of-speech case. As such, the law in Texas sets a very high standard. To prevail in a defamation case, Bowden needs to prove that the hospital acted with actual malice towards her, and that they lied with reckless disregard for the facts. Under the SLAPP law, she needs to present convincing evidence right at the outset of litigation, or risk dismissal. The judge gets to make the call.
But in this case, I think it's highly likely that the hospital spokespersons did know they were acting maliciously. The SLAPP statutes were enacted to protect individuals speaking out against big institutions and politicians; but giant corporations have turned the statute on its head, using it to get legitimate lawsuits dismissed before they can get to a jury.
Fortunately, there is a right to appeal, and Dr. Bowden has the funds to continue. She stated on her Twitter feed, that she intends to move forward. So it's not over yet.
What a huge surprise that a compromised, corrupt to the core judicial system would wholly support a compromised, corrupt to the core medical industry. I'm completely shocked!