Dr. Phil...

...that dude with the huge ego and overbearing manner has screwed up big time by sticking his nose in a pile of shit that he had no business sniffing. His behavior with Britney Spears has provoked a complaint to the California Board of Psychologists:

http://www.aolcdn.com/tmz_documents/0116_drphil_wm.pdf

His defense is going to be that he didn't charge the Spears family but why would he talk about an ill person anyway, anywhere, under any circumstances?

I'm sure all of you have heard of HIPPA. You have to sign those dumb policy's everywhere you go. HIPPA states clearly that people seeking medical treatment have a prima fascia right to privacy in their health matters. There's a reason for that...if people weren't assured of privacy, they might avoid seeking treatment.

Medical people have a special respect for a patent's confidentiality. It's the rare medical professional who would break that trust. It only serves to make all medical professionals appear untrustworthy.

Maybe Dr. Phil will get out of the "practising without a license" charge by saying that he didn't charge for his uninvited visit. But...he can't get out of the confidentiality breach that easily. I wouldn't have to be at work to keep a person's health information private...it's just the way we think. Confidentiality is so important that keeping it becomes a basic tenet of your behavior. It would never occur to any of us to discuss such matters outside of "medical need to know" parameters. It's a habit and basic tenet that is so important that when a person breaches that behavior, they know damn well what they're doing.

We go into the medical profession to help people, not to promote ourselves. This nutty "Doctor" flew to a state thousands of miles away to stick his nose into the medical health of a person who was in the hospital and already in the care of licensed doctors. No one asked him to, why did he do it? Strictly self promoting...no other reason. After the visit, he didn't go get Britney's chart and write any orders in it like real doctors do...he went in front of cameras to blab about the patient he had just seen.

I've always been a tad leery of Dr. Phil. It was nothing I could quite put my finger on but I didn't have a good feeling about him. Now I know why. He's a shameless self promoter who uses people at the lowest point of their lives to show his "amazing" ability to overstate the obvious.

And for some reason, he's trying to pawn his entire family off on us so that we can make each and every one of them rich. Who the hell are these people and what makes them ALL so special? All any of them have is a father/husband who has marketing skills that would make Barnum and Bailey envious.