RT.com, October
31, 2013
 |
| A gas flare burns at a fracking site in rural Bradford County, Pennsylvania. (Reuters / Les Stone) |
Pennsylvania
authorities have denied a doctor the right to challenge a so-called “medical
gag rule” that prevents him and other physicians from warning the public about
the health dangers associated with fracking.
Dr. Alfonso
Rodriguez of Dallas, Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit against the state last year,
asserting that Act 13 of 2012 forces medical professionals to enter “a vague
confidentiality agreement” that prevents them from having a completely honest
dialogue with patients.
Hydraulic
fracking involves drilling through underground shale rock with the help of
chemicals - many of them toxic - to release natural gas. Earlier this month, a
research team out of Duke University examined Pennsylvania wastewater and found
what they described as “alarmingly” high levels of radioactivity, salts,
metals, and other potentially harmful sediments.
Yet the
“medical gag rule” forbids doctors like Rodriguez from going into depth about
the health problems that chemicals from fracking can cause. Critics have said
the bill’s passage, and the court’s refusal to grant Dr. Rodriguez the right to
speak freely with his patients, is an indication of just how entrenched the oil
and gas lobby is in state politics.
Rodriguez
specializes in renal diseases, hypertension, and advanced diabetes. He “has
recently treated patients directly exposed to high-volume hydraulic fracturing
fluid as the result of well blowouts,” including a patient “with a complicated
diagnosis with low platelets, anemia, rash and acute renal failure that
required extensive hemodialysis and exposure to chemotherapeutic agents,” the
complaint stated, as quoted by Courthouse News.
For
fulfilling his true responsibility as a doctor, though, Rodriguez allegedly
risks violating the American Medical Association’s Principles of Medical
Ethics, an infraction that could cost him his medical license.
That may
well happen, because the state requires professional healthcare providers “to
enter into, upon request by gas drilling company or vendor, a vague
confidentiality agreement to maintain the specific identity any amount of any
chemicals claimed to be a trade secret by a gas drilling company and/or its
vendor as a condition precedent to receiving such information deemed
unnecessary to provide competent medical treatment to plaintiff’s patient,”
according to the complaint.
Despite
Rodriguez’s complaint that the provision is a violation of his First and 14th
Amendment rights, and multiple briefs filed by medical associations on his
behalf, a federal judge dismissed the suit upon deciding the issue was “too
conjectural” to stand.
“Although
plaintiff alleges that he requires the kind of information contemplated under
the act for the treatment of his patients, he does not allege that he has been
in a situation where he needed or attempted to obtain such information, despite
the fact that he alleges that he has treated patients injured by hydraulic
fracturing fluid in the past,” wrote Judge A. Richard Caputo. “Similarly,
plaintiff does not allege that he has been in a position where he was required
to agree to any sort of confidentiality agreement under the act."
The
decision goes on to state that any attempt Rodriguez made to notify his
patients of Act 13’s impact were “merely a prophylactic measure to ease his
fears of potential future harm.”
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