To us, so much about the NSW health care systems and their so called regulation is illustrated by the Kerrie Meades story, as told to us by one of our readers, and on which we have done so much work.
We could write a book on it, but briefly.
Our reader was referred to Dr Meades in early 2010 for help with his double vision, which resulted in him spending 3 or 4 hours with her and her colleague, Dr Jennifer Sandbach, running up more and more fees, from which our reader says he learnt nothing – saying that it was obviously their strategy to try and scare him out of his wits by saying that the causes of his double vision could be VERY serious, and that “management of double vision is quite complex,” to quote the words of Dr Meades in one of the emails she sent him. His view is that he could still be in their rooms having more and more consultations had he not eventually decided that enough was enough and gone to another Ophthalmologist.
That new Opthalmologist was Dr Ross Fitzsimons, who solved his problems in two minutes. In contrast to the utter rubbish peddled to him by Meades and Sandbach, he advised that from his double vision’s history it was most unlikely that it was caused by anything serious but that if he wanted to remove any doubt he could have an MRI of his brain – which he did, and it was clear! And to help with/solve the practical problems of his double vision, he could have prisms put into his glasses, which he did, and he says he went from, in particular, when he was driving a car he was a danger to himself and others on the road, to it being as though he was 30 again! – prisms not being mentioned by Meades and Sandbach at all.
Nothing illustrates what Dr Meades is like better than two paragraphs in an email she sent our reader on 14 Oct 2012 at 1.03 am in the morning – perhaps while she was drunk?
So, after all she’d written about our readers’ double vision, to the HCCC and elsewhere, even earlier in the same email, she writes to our reader saying that she’s decided he didn’t have any double vision at all!!!!!!!!!!?????????? – that he’d somehow tricked the Optometrist who’d referred him to her into thinking he had double vision, that he’d also somehow tricked her and Dr Sandbach into spending 3 or 4 hours working on the problem, when all the time he didn’t have any, it was all because he got “some sort of kick out of it.”
Our reader reports that he has recently seen an Optometrist and an Ophthalmologist and they have both been amazed at the extent to which he doesn’t have a problem with his cataracts, at how long it may be before he needs a cataracts operation – more than 7 years after, “you were very uncooperative to treat as you did not believe the problem of double vision could be related to your cataracts,” according to Dr Meades.
Yet all the indications are that Dr Meades has a thriving business in Personal Eyes.
Come on people – we can do better than this.
And then there’s what happened when complaints were made about Dr Meades to the HCCC, which is just laughable – about which more later.
