Who Pawned Biter’s Patients?

"Chess" by Gillonde/CC by-nc-nd via Flickr

A new website has cropped up for controversial San Diego-area OB/gyn Robert Biter, ostensibly to help raise funds to build his Babies By the Sea birth center.

It offers donors the option of donating via PayPal, making a deposit directly to a bank account, or writing a check, payable to Robert Biter, MD.

More interesting, however, is Dr. Biter’s personal message to his patients:

“In many OB practices, a doctor sees a patient at some visits and a stranger delivers. You know that I do not practice that way. “Everything that I have done has kept you, my patients, as first priority. This has cost me hospital privileges that I rightfully won back, a lot of money, and even more nights of lost sleep. I don’t know what to say to reassure you other than that. My commitment to you has never been up in the air. My refusal to allow your birth to be a political or financial deal has put me into this unwanted situation, but you and your baby are worth it. “

However Biter’s actions don’t fully support his statement of principle.

If he is still seeing patients for prenatal visits, those who deliver before he arranges new privileges will certainly have a different attending provider, even if Dr. Biter follows through with his offer to act as doula. It seems he is content to have these patients under the clinical care of one provider for prenatal care and another for delivery, in spite of his claim that he doesn’t practice that way.

Surely his patients—especially those due to deliver or those who will need hospital-based care within the next few weeks would have been better served had Biter exercised the privileges he “rightfully won back” to provide continuing care for these patients at Scripps until he could arrange privileges at another hospital.

Instead, he resigned all his privileges—either voluntarily or as part of a deal to ensure his suspension didn’t get reported to the state medical board—ensuring that his patients with the most urgent needs would need to scramble to find other providers.

It seems to me that it is Dr. Biter who has used his patients as pawns in making a “political” statement about birth.

[Hat-tip to The Skeptical OB]