Henry Kissinger famously stated during the Nixon years that “Power is the greatest aphrodisiac.” More than a century earlier Abraham Lincoln noted that “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” Every hospital as an institution has a power structure among its medical staff. Powerful members of a medical staff are never the subject of sham peer review and rarely the subject of any kind of meaningful peer review. Armed with the control over the peer review process and the statutory immunity and other protections, medical staff leaders wield an immense amount of personal power over those on the medical staff that the view as threats, competitors, or of a lesser station that need to be put in place because of racial or sexual bias or just because they get a level of glee out the use of power to “kick down.”
