MEXICO .- Lucero Campos arrived at the Salvador Zubirán National Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition due to a problem of sinusitis and came out without an eye. Or rather, with a blank eye, as if the iris and pupil had been submerged in chlorine.
That makes four years and therefore maintains a legal claim against the public health institution that decided to close the issue.
“But I’m not going to stop until justice is done,” warned the actress, singer and television host in an interview with this newspaper.
Lucero Campos decided to make public his case for psychological medical suggestion, after a long period of depression that caused damage to his face. “I live from the image and they no longer call me to work because of the appearance of my eyes, which were the most beautiful thing that I had, what stood out the most.”
Now it is added to a long list of cases related to alleged medical negligence, malpractice and poor care in the Mexican health sector that have caused harm to thousands of people in recent years, according to reports from the National Commission of Rights Human Rights (CNDH) , of the National Commission of Medical Arbitration and of the civil organization Impunidad Cero.
Annually, the CNDH insists that the Health Sector is the area that accumulates the most complaints due to lack of protection measures, for omitting medical attention, omitting home security, lack of medicines, medical negligence and even workplace harassment.
In the annual activity report 2020, the CNDH posted 2, 876 complaint files in with from the Health Sector authorities for various reasons, a fifth of them (481) for medical negligence, an average that has been maintained for more than a decade.
Lucero Castro’s eye problem started in 2017 with a retinal detachment that was treated in the Hospital Juárez de México, a government institution where he regularly attended. There they operated on her. He could no longer regain his sight but it did not affect his aesthetics: the eye was still there.
Over time , the eye began to water. So she went to see the doctor who operated on her. He sent her a CT scan and it detected an obstruction in the paranasal sinus. The actress decides to move to the hospital at the Salvador Subirán National Institute of Nutrition and Medical Sciences and that is where she meets for the first time with the otolaryngology specialist Ignacio Eduardo Gutiérrez de Velazco Hernández.
“He was rude and overbearing and he didn’t even look up when I entered the office and I felt very bad because I was going in a fever and I was expecting a good treatment, on the other hand, he had a haughty attitude and, without sending me to do my studies, he said that I had to have surgery. ”
Lucero Castro refused. Then the doctor gave him a treatment for two weeks. She took it but felt worse every day: all the muscles in her face, bones, and her eye continued to cry, as she recalls.
he inserted an eight-centimeter needle and without anesthesia ”, he recalls in his version.
He says It hurt so much that he gave a deafening scream but the doctor ignored it. He continued with his own, hitting the needle here and there inside the woman’s nose. Lucero Castro affirms that the otorhinolaryngologist hit the syringe with a hammer and when she protested again he asked her to let him work in peace and stop making fuss.
At the end of the dance of the A lot of blood came out of the needle and a yellowish, greenish liquid came out of the cavity. In the microbiology area of the hospital they told him that it was a bacterium that had caused the infection but it is not known how that bacterium entered his nose.
Castro’s version is that the ENT did not wait for the results of the studies and acted on his own and for this reason he damaged his ocular eye due to the intervention with the needle and the inadequate treatment. “The infection tried to get out and passed to the lacrimal and contaminated the entire eye until the cornea became discolored and the eyeball lost color.”
The arbitrator
Face these accusations of Lucero Castro before the Ministry of Health and the Attorney General of Mexico City has been “exhausting” for the accused doctor Ignacio Eduardo Gutiérrez de Velazco Hernández. In an interview with this newspaper, she tells that the National Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition has offered alternatives to repair the damage but that she does not accept them because she demands 10 million pesos (around half a million dollars) .
“It was already clarified in the expert opinion carried out by the Hospital de la Ceguera it was not negligence on my part ”, he warns. “The matter is also in the Public Ministry and the process continues there.”
According to the otorhinolaryngologist, The patient arrived with a severe infection in the paranasal sinus, a CT scan was taken and there it was observed that she was about to have a complication in the brain.
“She was offered an intervention but, by the time he arrived at my office, he already had a complication because he had been put silicone in the Juarez Hospital and made rejection for the silicone “, he specifies.
– Why What does she demand of you and the Institute and not the Juarez Hospital, then?
– I don’t know. What I can say is that the decision I made was to save her life and if today she is healthy and alive it is because they acted on time.
Lucero Castro says that tried to speak with the Institute authorities to complain but they did not receive it and therefore took the case to the National Medical Arbitration Commission (Conamed), the highest arbitrator at the national level in cases related to malpractice of the trade union in the public and private sector.
The arbitration procedure in Conamed is followed when the patient and his doctor do not agree to reconcile and both parties authorize him to intervene in order to resolve the merits of the complaint.
To resolve the case, Conamed relies on the opinion of an external advisor, who is a certified medical expert. In the event that the medical and legal analysis shows that there is indeed a refusal in the provision of medical services or irregularity in the service, compensation is made.
In the case of the presenter Lucero Castro, the external advisor (Hospital de la Ceguera) agreed with the doctor. But she argues that there was “influentialism” and “corruption” to cover up the otorhinolaryngologist, “who is a“ powerful ”in the world of public health.”
“He is a very good man related ”, he warns.
In an analysis of the civil organization Impunidad Cero entitled Public Health in Mexico, ¿ a problem of impunity ?, the researcher Laura García Velasco, concluded that although Conamed is an alternative means of conflict resolution that presupposes an agile procedure, with lower economic cost for the affected users, on the other hand, He has a problem of origin.
By depending on the Ministry of Health, he becomes a judge and party in cases where the accused work for the government.
“In principle it can be argued that there is compliance by the State to foresee and repair the possible effects on patients due to acts or omissions of health professionals, but it is not done in an adequate way,” he warns.
“So, since Conamed does not have effective mechanisms for this, medical malpractice goes unpunished.”
Of the 279 cases analyzed by Zero Impunity, in 154 (52. 51%) it was concluded that there was evidence of malpractice; Meanwhile in 125 of them, it was determined that there was no evidence (44. 8%). Of what corresponds to the public sector, 56 cases yielded evidence of malpractice (58. 9%), and 39 were left without evidence (41. 1%).
In addition, in the concluded awards – based on evaluation of the medical act– the percentage of good practice is 125, while malpractice presents the 154; regarding compensation, only in 58 cases were authorized, that is, one fifth.
“The aforementioned data allow us to conclude that, in the matter of public health services, there is impunity,” concludes García Velasco. “Conamed is not effective.”
Zero Impunity suggests that federal legislators improve the medical arbitration system so that Conamed is not judge and party, who is not “only of a decentralized body of the Ministry of Health, but of a Commission with greater autonomy and powers, and with sufficient material and human resources to carry out its function.”
In the same way, it suggests that the federal legislator can establish the obligation that In the medical and hospital units there is an area for patient care, with personnel trained in orientation and containment in order to prevent the conflict from escalating to Conamed in addition to having a statistic of complaints and disagreements that until now does not exist.
Lucero and other cases
The institution that until now has kept a more accurate record of cases of negligence and medical malpractices and s the National Human Rights Commission and its counterparts in the states, however, many victims complain that their misfortunes are ignored because there is no clear selection mechanism for these bodies to attract cases.
Lucero Castro is one of these dissatisfied. “Human rights commissions are not good either,” he points out the opaque rules to attract investigations as well as the lack of binding character with the files of public ministries.
Despite all the public money that the human rights commissions use for their investigations, the Human Rights findings do not serve to integrate a judicial investigation, it is only a call for attention to the officials and leaves them at their discretion to abide by them or not.
Due to all this context, the case of Lucero Castro is without support in the local prosecution; on the medical issue he no longer has a salvation: the “only option” he has is to wait for the eyeball to be removed and a prosthesis inserted.
“This is criminal damage because I I live from the image, I act, sing, and they no longer call me to work ”, he says.
For this decrease he spent almost all his savings and has had to resort to family, friends and colleagues for money loans. They no longer call her so that they can you at private events or political events. She recently had a proposal to do a reality show on Televisión Azteca, where they convinced her to talk about her case, make it public and take the bull by the horns when talking about her psychological problems due to the blow to her image. “I have had to attend the Comprehensive Mental Health Center for depression, sadness and anger and there they also advised me to talk about it,” he warns. “I’m not going to leave and I’m going to go to the last consequences.”
Like her, every year Stories of patient victims of the public and private health system jump to the media with cases of babies who go blind, mothers who were taken away from the opportunity to raise their children, people who were left lame, handicapped, disabled or unable to use themselves by herself…
In the latest CNDH report (2020) highlighted a complaint similar to that of Lucero Castro but in the Family Medicine Unit No. 25 of the Mexican Institute of Social Security in Chiapas, where a doctor without having confirmed a dengue diagnosis prescribed increasingly complicated drugs until the patient arrived at the hospital with convulsions. He went into cardiac arrest and died.
The victim’s father stated that before the body was taken away, a public servant from the IMSS told him: “if you demand we will open your daughter, to do an autopsy ”. The family did not want to do this procedure due to religious beliefs and that is why they took the girl to be buried. Then he spoke about his case in front of the CNDH and added one more case.
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