Act one of this week’s This American Life is a horrific tale of a doctor, among other things, gone bad in a rural Texas hospital.
In a small west Texas town called Kermit, two nurses were accused of harassment after they complained to the medical board that a doctor was putting patients in danger. The nurses were fired and then arrested, facing ten years in prison. Reporter Saul Elbein found that a group of powerful men in Kermit went to extreme and sometimes ridiculous lengths to try to bring down these nurses.
The story reveals, among other things, the challenges of getting high quality doctors to practice in some rural areas.
