Medical Conditions at the DCLEC, Update 9/22/11

The Doctor at the Dearborn County law Enforcement Center, Dr. Nadir Al-Shami, is either one of the most highly trained and medically diverse physicians in the world, or he is conspiring with Sheriff Michael Kreinhop and Captain Dave Hall to deny proper medical care to DCLEC inmates. I have written how Dr. Al-Shami and the DCLEC altered my Ritalin prescription without contacting my prescribing physician, which is a violation of 201 IAC 3-1-11(k). The DCLEC contends that Dr. Al-Shami is as qualified, if not more qualified, than my treating physician and experts at Harvard Medical School in determining proper prescription dosages for adults diagnosed with ADHD. The DCLEC and Dr. Al-Shami believe that Dr. Al-Shami is more than qualified to overrule the prescription orders of a liver specialist, as Dr. Al-Shami altered the prescription of a man, who receives disability due to problems with his liver, without consulting the liver specialist and without performing any medical testing. As Dr. Al-Shami is a medical “expert” who wears many hats, Sheriff Kreinhop and Captain Dave Hall crowned Dr. Al-Shami as the DCLEC expert in an entirely different specialized medical field; dentistry.

Unfortunately this isn’t an attempt by me to create some kind of satirical metaphor to emphasize the inadequacies of the health care available to inmates in the DCLEC. This is another example of how Sheriff Kreinhop, Captain Dave Hall and Dr. Nadir Al-Shami, of Advanced Correctional Healthcare, are maliciously denying medical treatment to DCLEC inmates. The latest medical policy of the DCLEC requires inmates to first meet with the jail doctor before seeing the jail dentist. If Dr. Al-Shami determines that the dental issue is a medical emergency then the inmate is permitted to see the dentist. I learned about this new policy on 9/19/11, when an inmate informed me that he was prohibited from seeing the dentist for an abscessed, decayed tooth because Dr. Al-Shami concluded that the dental issue was not a medical emergency. This is coming from the same doctor who tells inmates to meditate rather than allowing the inmates to take medications that were prescribed prior to the inmates’ incarceration. This is the same doctor who had to consult with a prescription reference book to determine what average Ritalin dosages actually were before he altered the dose of my prescribing physician, who specializes in treating adults diagnosed with ADHD. I’ve known the inmate with the dental problem for five months. I’ve spent a good part of my jail time talking to him and getting to know him. I know that every few weeks the man is holding the right side of his jaw because his decayed tooth has developed an abscess. My cheap jail dictionary defines an abscess as “An infected place in the body which becomes sore and swollen and contains pus”. I’m neither a general practice doctor, nor am I a doctor of dentistry but I can say with certainty that the man’s tooth is dark gray, on its way to turning black. Judging from his swollen gum and the appearance of a boil just below the tooth, I’d say it meets the definition of “abscess.” Is the condition a medical emergency? Not by DCLEC standards. In my six months in the DCLEC I’ve concluded that there are two factors in determining whether a situation is a medical emergency: 1) Is the inmate going to die within the next fifteen minutes; and 2) Can the DCLEC be sued if they fail to provide medical treatment. Those are the DCLEC tests for “medical emergency.”

The inmate with the bad tooth is approximately 6’ 3” and probably weighs close to 320 pounds. He used to exercise regularly by walking stairs but is now unable to do so because of foot and ankle problems due to the fact that DCLEC foot ware offers little support for a man of his size. (Note: The inmate did see the DCLEC doctor about his foot problems, but Dr. Al-Shami, who also serves as the DCLEC podiatrist, concluded that the inmate did not have any problems with his feet.) So now the DCLEC is acknowledging the inmate has mobility problems, is very overweight and has reoccurring infections in his mouth that the DCLEC will not treat. Why, because he probably won’t die on the watches of Sheriff Kreinhop and Captain Dave Hall.

The DCLEC denies medical treatment to inmates out of convenience and/or to save money. The DCLEC dentist is only available once a month. This is to maintain the dental health of inmates as required by law. Sheriff Kreinhop and Captain Dave Hall use Dr. Nadir Al-Shami and Advanced Correctional Healthcare as a “buffer” to keep medical expenses low. The DCLEC did not drastically reduce my Ritalin prescription to protect my health. If the DCLEC was concerned about my health, the medical staff would have contacted my prescribing doctor before reducing my dose to less than a third of my original prescription. Dr. Al-Shami’s latest dental diagnosis is an oxymoron of monumental proportions. Dr. Al-Shami concluded that the inmate’s dental problem was not a medical emergency so it was not necessary for the inmate to see the dentist the next time the dentist arrived at the DCLEC. If the dental problem would have been a medical emergency (emergency – A sudden and unexpected situation requiring prompt action), the inmate would have been forced to wait up to several weeks until the jail dentist would be available to address the “sudden and unexpected” dental “situation requiring prompt action.” Dr. Al-Shami’s findings also demonstrate another troubling problem; either the DCLEC staff is incapable of detecting medical emergencies that require “prompt” medical action, or the DCLEC staff is willfully and maliciously subjecting an overweight inmate’s heart and body to unnecessary infections on a regular basis because treatment is inconvenient and/or costly. By the way, did I mention that the inmate was only requesting that the decayed tooth by pulled? Unfortunately, the new dental policy requires an inmate’s tooth to become infected to the point the infection subsequently leads to life threatening blood poisoning, which, by Dr. Al-Shami’s account, will require the inmate to wait until Dr. Al-Shami is scheduled to be in the DCLEC because the DCLEC staff is not capable of detecting medical emergencies and/or qualified to handle the “sudden and unexpected” medical “situation requiring prompt actions.”

Feel free to contact Dearborn County Sheriff Mike Kreinhop and/or DCLEC Captain Dave Hall with any questions or concerns about the negligent medical practices of the DCLEC. Feel free to contact local and state officials to express your opinions regarding the malicious and dangerous medical practices of Dr. Nadir Al-Shami and Advanced Correctional Healthcare. I will be providing Sheriff Kreinhop and Captain Hall hard copies of this post so there will be no question of whether they are aware of the matter.