that doctor-patient confidentiality ends when the patient dies.

I wonder if that's true...

Dr. Parikh and Salon.

Thank you for shedding light on something no one else has talked about.

Michael Jackson deserves what every patient in American has a right to: privacy.

He deserves privacy at least with regards to his medical history and information.

Thanks for writing about this. I watched the Larry King interview and winced when Dr. Klein mentioned the discoloration ("butterfly-shaped"). Whatever one believes about MJ, we all deserve privacy in medical matters, and we'll all be better off health care wise if we're assured of this privacy.

Yeah, we don't know about even the common decency of this. If Jackson said Klein could discuss it when he was dead or that he WANTED Klein to do so it might bug us, but it might not have bugged him.

Yet again, as in most things Michael Jackson, we really have no idea.

I recently had a dependent in psychiatric care. The health carrier refused to reimburse until THEY could review the case records. This is entirely legal. So you have two choices - cut your carrier out and pay for it all yourself, or, discard your own privacy. And since you're the one who 'sacrificed' then you legally have little if any recourse regardless of what happens when that information is out in the wild.

No matter what is said, and by whom, someone killed Michael Jackson. It's that simple. While he lay helplessly and hopelessly full of drugs already, someone injected him with more, knowing full well his condition and that he could easily die from more drugs. Every doctor has taken an oath of responsibility to each and every patient, pledging to first do no harm; whichever doctor, or doctors, fed and pumped this poor creature full of pills and other injected drugs, should be publicly hung in Town's Square. Let the doctor(s) who caused his death be as publicly humiliated in life as Michael has been in death. Michael desperately needed someone to help him live, not die. It is a very, very sad story.

The government, as we have seen under the Bush Administration and now under Obama, recognizes no one's right to privacy.

They are above the law ...... such mores are only necessary to keep the common rabble in control ...... such mundane considerations are of no concern for those who are amoral and believe the means justify the ends.

HIPPA is being willfully violated by state governments all over the country.

I am a pharmacist in NC. Every month we have to take our valuable time to file a report to a state agency detailing every prescription we have filled for a controlled substance.

Every pharmacist in NC has to file this report every month.

The data is reviewed by idiots. This law was passed by the NC Legislature at the simple request of some county sheriff.

Now, I'll be the first to say that docs are putting more drugs on the streets now than the Columbian drug lords ..... but this is private medical information under HIPPA and also represents "profiling" which is illegal.

This is happening in many states and no one is challenging its legality.

Drug interactions, incorrect proscriptions, the wrong drug given kill tens of thousands of people each year. It's one of the most common causes of death today.

And is that any better than the tens of thousands of people who abuse Tylenol and NSAIDS all on their own, to their own death?

If you are in fact a pharmacist in NC, I would think you'd know that the acronym is HIPAA, not HIPPA.

Part of a job I held for almost eighteen years was checking medical records on a psychiatric unit. One day, I was called to the separate alcoholism unit to do an audit of their records. I found records in boxes, records in piles on the floor, records unsorted by patient number and other horrors. My partner and I were horrified and demanded that people be held accountable. They were. The procedures were tightened and more frequent audits were conducted by people not attached to the unit.

The records of any patient must be protected with the same care that the patient himself or herself should be and with the same respect. Farrah Fawcett did not have to battle for her privacy while battling cancer. Michael Jackson's medical record should NEVER have been breached, especially by a doctor. A physician who is "porous" forfeits the trust of his patients. I don't care how good a surgeon that man is, he is a lousy doctor.

He was under the relentless interrogation of that journalistic pitbull, Larry King. The poor guy broke under the pressure. He should have remembered that all he needed to give was name, rank and serial number.

I am indeed a pharmacist in NC and what I say is true.

Fuck the government.

I was always under the impression that doctors and medical professional garnered respect, admiration and high compensation because of discretion, training/education and compassion. When that's broken and the guy is dead, it really is the worst kind of fame whoring. This guy sounds like a real piece of work.

The dude's dead and his face was a public cartoon for over a decade. This article, which by the way repeats all the dirt, is a bunch of weak-kneed hand wringing--a real anatomical trick.

Somehow the HIPPA vs HIPAA mistake is not uncommon among bona fide medical people. I don't know why, maybe our brains are just more used to seeing PP than AA. I used to have to stop and think which was correct even when I was having HIPAA training at least annually.

Larry King is purely and simply a ratings whore. How else could he have had O.J. Simpson on show after show, giving him a platform to deny the double murder?

Dr. Klein apparently aspires to be that. He needs to have a long talk with Dr. Phil about the ethics of all this. Or maybe with Dr. Kevorkian.