Banner Hospital Does Drug Testing Without Informed Consent.
When we got the bill for having a baby at the hospital, the bills came to over $12,000. For a normal delivery. In the list of what we were billed for was the vitamin K shot, and billing for all the charges they made to us while they fixed the results of the vitamin K shot. People should be told this. The public should be made aware of this. But then when we read down the list, we found that there was an oxytocin shot when contractions were already present, once again, without consent. Further down the list there is a battery of drug tests for illicit drugs, once again without informed consent. And for this they charged us over a $1,000. What kind of nazi fascist country has this become?

Where is Our Organic Baby?
The apparent mentality at Banner Baywood Hospital is to find reason to attach as many medical processes as possible to one patient as possible. Billable events. Having a sore throat and a cough is not reason for a chest x-ray. Billing though just might be.

The issue is consent. We did not authorize ointment to be put in the child's eyes or for the child to be injected with vitamin K. It became increasingly clear that the hospital has its own mandate and handles the babies as if they are in a potato hopper. Weigh, inject, slather, measure, draw blood, fry, draw blood (punctures in heels) computerize, move about.

Most of these traumatic events take place when the baby has been taken out of the room, away from the mother. For thousands of years God has been sending babies to earth, and the doctors figure He just didn't do good enough and they need to inject vitamin K within minutes of birth.

We were very disturbed at the attitude of staff. One doctor told me, "We do things different here." Let them tell that to our lawyer.

All in all, the child is traumatized. Parents are not kept in the loop. The only thing we were ever asked about is if we wanted the HepB vaccine which we refused immediately.

During the delivery the doctor kept telling my wife to push, but after the delivery my wife commented that babies come out on their own and you never push them, or they get a face bruise as did our daughter.

Everything seemed to be lined up for the convenience of a factory birth, not the child and mother.

At 5am on Tuesday my wife said that she wanted to go home. I told the hospital staff by 6am that we wanted to leave. I was told that doctors would not be there until 10am.

The nurse said, "It will be hours before you can leave." Hours turned into two days.

At 10am doctors told me that we could leave but we could not take the baby with us, she had to stay at least 48 hours. (Like it is written in the law somewhere?)

Then they said that the baby needed light treatment, that the baby was overdue, but later they told us the baby was right on time. They took the baby to the nursery on Tuesday morning, and said they would bring her back to breast feed. By 2:30 they had not returned with the baby. I called hospital staff and asked them why the baby had not been brought back to the mother? They said the baby had been fed formula with no concern that the mother wanted to breast feed her baby. Michu said that the baby's body was a brilliant red like it exposed to a LOT of heat. We never gave the hospital permission to do this.

Then the nurse came and said she had to test Michu for strept throat. After doing that she came back and said that "maybe" Michu had pneumonia, so she had to take her for an x ray. "Its the lightest dose xray there is, the chest x-ray".

Tuesday evening a hospital staff member comes and begins asking Michu many questions. She is from the social worker's office. My wife says she wants to call me and picks up the cell phone. The social worker told her not to call me. My wife says, "That is when I became suspicious of her intentions and I quit talking to her."

Wednesday morning around 10am the hospital calls me and says that my wife can not leave until a social worker meets with me, the oppointment is set up for 3:30.

I call the Mesa police and get an officer at the front desk. When I state that the hospital is holding my wife against her will, the police officer states, "Well sir, it seems obvious that there is some kind of criminal investigation going on," as if hospitals are authorized to start their own criminal investigations.

At the 3:45 meeting the social worker states that because my wife did not have western style prenatal care they are concerned and they want to know why she did not have prenatal care as if some crime had been committed.

I contact the Mesa Tribune and speak with a reporter. They call the Banner Baywood Hospital and a head nurse immediately comes to the room and says that there has been some big cultural misunderstanding. I ask her what that would be, being a white American? What part of my culture did I misunderstand? I restate for her that we never gave the hospital permission to detain us past 6am Tuesday. (The reporter asked, "who pays for that extra time at the hospital?)

For a time my wife had a fever, and the nurses then told her to stop breast feeding. I can imagine Akha women all over south east Asia stopping breast feeding while they have what ever fever. So the baby begins to cry and cries and cries and cries. My wife says, if the baby keeps crying its throat will swell. Not to be daunted, it is however important to take the baby to a computerized hearing test, which of course takes a lot more time when the baby is crying.

A nurse from the nurses station comes and asks the techy if she would close the door so they don't have to hear the baby crying. The techy says that they are not allowed to close the door when testing a baby.

Michu, all too familiar with hearing the stories of Akha women who's babies were stolen by hospital staff in Thailand, says, "My daughter is beautiful and they wanted to keep her."

Before leaving I hear a nurse at the nursing station in Maternity telling a man, "We can't release the baby to you for 48 hours." as if it is some law that they have the right to make up. How many other families are being treated the same way?

All in all, the hospital acts and bully's like it has the right to detain the baby and its mother and do all these tests without our EXPLICIT approval, just sweep us along and everything is about hospital procedure, nothing about the parents or the baby. All along they keep saying that it is out of concern for the baby that they put the baby through so much misery.

With numerous parties calling the hospital about why we haven't been released yet, we are finally able to get baby and mother out of Banner Baywood by 5:30pm. 35 1/2 hours after we first tried to leave.

Our experience at Banner Baywood was not a pleasant child birth experience. Parents are totally disregarded behind a storm of papers and procedures. Nurses and doctors consistently reaffirm in an authoritarian way that they are in control and that the parents are not. Our impression from the staff and social workers was that we were being treated as criminals because we did not measure up to their standard of prenatal checkups. Staff stated that "when ever there has not been prenatal care we do this." Who's prenatal care, theirs or ours? I told the staff very specifically on Wednesday that the hospital immediately takes control away from the parents and begins doing things to the new baby that they have no permission to do.

There was a clear lack of ethnic minority staff working in the maternity ward. My wife felt there was some level of prejudice against our family and that the social workers were looking for some way to make a legal problem for us.

There are many people who are working over time to make this a police state. With absolutely no one at all to take the blame.

From "How to Raise a Healthy Child in Spite of your Doctor"
by Dr. Robert Mendelsohn MD:
p. 46
"Many doctors routinely give vitamin K to newborn babies because they have been taught that infants are born with a deficiency of this vitamin, which influences how rapidly the baby's blood will clot. That's nonsense, unless the mother is severely malnourished; but most doctors do it anyway. Administration of vitamin K to the newborn may produce jaundice, which prompts the pediatrician to treat it with bilirubin lights (phototherapy). These lights expose the baby to a dozen documented hazards that may require still further treatment and possibly affect him for the rest of his life."

BUT what the doctor told us was that possibly being overdue caused the bilirubin levels to be high, rather than the damn vitamin k shot they gave the baby caused the bilirubin levels to be high and they needed to fry our daughter in heat lamps in order to "fix that". For what ever reason our daughter came back with areas in the white of her eyes filled with blood.

All the hospital was supposed to do was deliver the baby, turn her over to her mother and provide a warm safe bed. If you want your child born in an environment where your wife is a person, and your baby is handed back to the mother, and left alone from intrusive elements when not obviously ill, then we would recommend a midwife instead of Banner Hospital. At Banner, every turn of events is an excuse for more risky intrusions into the life of baby and mother. You will find NO ADVOCATES for minimal intrusion or organic living at Banner Baywood. They are "boss" and they let you know it. Banner Baywood violated our rights to Free, Prior and Informed Consent. Our car has more respect at Jiffy Lube.

We file a report with the Mesa Police
Ok, the Mesa police are swamped, but we filed a report with them anyway, that Michu had been detained at the hospital without consent by the doctor, Dr. Bullaro-Anderer. Of course we got the immediate brush off that it was a civil matter.

Next Stop
Arizona Medical Board
Attorney General's Office on Civil Rights

Vitamin K