The Number of Medical Malpractice Claims and Their Amounts

When the patients on the ward gather for the group therapy session, Nurse Ratched will bring her log book, which accounts for everything the patients say within their sessions. If there is something a patient likes or finds interesting, the patient will write down what they hear and signs their name, and the reward is extra sleep. The nurse is using these patients like her secret police, to make sure there isn’t funny business between the patients. This just further builds the case for the controlling behavior and authority of the nurse.

Whenever a session isn’t going in the direction, she wants it to go, she’ll announce to the group, “Am I to take it that there’s not a man among you that has committed some act that he has never admitted?”, to try to get patients to turn on one another. She picks up her log book, and says “Must we go over the past history?”

That prompts something in the minds of the patients, a device in their minds, that once they hear those words spoken, the vault in their brain holding these innermost thoughts, that could endanger their comrades will spill out.

The acutes, (as they are called in this story) are waiting for the psychological tricks of the nurse to work, and there is always one patient that breaks. His mouth starts to work out the words, ‘I robbed a cash register at a service station.’ Her eyes will then move down the line of patients.

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‘I tried to take my little sister to bed.’ (48) Each and every individual patient is a target, and she will use this to her advantage for the next group therapy session. (48) We can see, that the nurse’s goal is not to help these patients, who are in need of help after the numerous problems were listed. She’s there to “sit in the center of this web of wires like a watchful robot”. Nurse Ratched puts down these damaged people of society, just enough until they beg for forgiveness because then she knows she has won them over, and they’re within her grasp of control.

The shock shop and lobotomy are the most common way the nurse will deal with a troublesome patient. When a patient is acting bad or hostile, like McMurphy. McMurphy’s first real physical altercation, was when they found Billy Bibbit dead, with his neck sliced open with the doctor’s instrument. The Nurse’s reaction, post-suicide, pushes McMurphy over the edge, and he chokes her, because in her mind, ‘the best thing we can do is go on with our daily routine’. This ignorance of a patient’s suicide drives McMurphy up the wall, and he wants Nurse Ratched to know that this was her fault that Billy has killed himself, and there is nothing Nurse Ratched can do to bring him back. How dare she, stand over his bloody corpse, and address the crowd to calm down as they look on in shock, as a patient has killed themselves, because of the treatments of Nurse Ratched.

As McMurphy, continues to cause scenes in front of other patients, he becomes the symbol for freedom and prosperity for the patients. However, he didn’t want to be that, yet he continues to cause a ruckus in the Nurse’s ward. Ratched sends the patient to receive a lobotomy, where a surgery is performed in which a part of the brain is cut to treat mental illness. Many people today, are trying to find the link between treatment and torture with patients, in an attempt, to understand the pain inflicted onto patients during procedures. And really it lies at the heart of nursing. Malpractice, ‘can be attributed negligent behavior by a medical practitioner or other health care profession’ (‘An Analysis of the Number of Medical Malpractice Claims and Their Amounts’). Nurses perform invasive and embarrassing procedures which cause patients physical and psychological pain, and immobilization of limbs for medical procedures or safety.

When Washington, (one of Nurse Ratched’s ‘Black Boys’), inserts the rectal thermometer into Chief Bromden, as wells as many others, this invasive act is textbook rape of a patient and highly illegal. Abusing these patients, for their own sick and twisted ‘treatments’ is not what they were hired to do. However, Nurse Ratched has complete control over these patients, and can whatever she wants, because they feel lost without her. Nurse Ratched, ran a tight ship, until McMurphy came along to the ward. Nurse Ratched, wasn’t used to the challenge to her authority, many patients would just cave to whatever she demanded. The cruel punishments were not fit for a human being, but because these patients were willing to do anything for their safety, which actually turned out to be abuse. Abuse in mental institutions, has been going on for years, even before this book, and until we start paying attention to the Ken Kesey’s of the world, we won’t get anywhere.