Pubdate: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 Source: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock, AR) Copyright: 2014 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. Contact: http://www2.arkansasonline.com/contact/voicesform/ Website: http://www2.arkansasonline.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/25 Note: Accepts letters to the editor from Arkansas residents only Author: Kalisha Willis DRUG-TEST DOCTORS TOO Doctors are well-respected around the United States. I think you will rarely find doctors in today's world with any problems or anything wrong with them. But to be on the safe side, in my opinion, doctors, just like everyone else, should be drug-tested. To get other jobs you have to be drug-tested, so why can't doctors be like others and be drug-tested as well? Some doctors could be all doped up while working on patients; who wants a doctor working on them while there's something wrong with them and they're not in their right mind? The way people are dying, we don't need the people we depend on and trust the most with our sickness to be the cause of deaths. In a recent New York Times article, a doctor had hepatitis C, a potentially fatal virus, The painkiller he used for the patients was the same he used for himself; while injecting his arm and then patient's arms with the same needle, he transmitted his disease to the patients. That goes to show that you can't trust everyone you hire. How can you be a doctor when you're sick yourself? This doctor killed two people with his sickness before he was finally arrested. I believe hospitals should perform random drug and health checkups monthly. The tests should be comprehensive enough to screen for fentanyl and other commonly abused drugs. In that case, I believe all doctors should be drug-tested because doctors are like normal people. Everyone has struggles and you never know what someone could be going through. All health-care workers with access to drugs, including doctors, should be subject to mandatory drug testing. KALISHA WILLIS Strong - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom