Articles Posted in Medical Negligence

This article from Newsweek reveals some interesting information on medical errors.

An excerpt:

Undoing a culture is hard, especially one steeped in hierarchy and intimidation, where doctors tend to reign supreme and nurses, pharmacists, and technicians fall into the ranks below. “What underlies it is arrogance,” says Pronovost, an anesthesiologist and director of Hopkins’s Quality and Safety Research Group. In his book he describes a run-in with a surgeon who refused to switch from latex to non-latex gloves during a hernia operation, despite Pronovost’s concern that the patient was having a potentially fatal latex-allergy reaction. It was only after a nurse picked up the phone to call the hospital president that the surgeon relented. “This patient,” Pronovost writes, “could have died from ignorance and arrogance—a lethal combination.”

This article from NPR caught my eye.  Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), a physician, said recently on the House Republican website America Speaking Out that the tab runs "an astounding $650 billion each year. That’s 26 percent of all money spent on health care."  

As the article notes, 

 a series of studies published in the current issue of the policy journal Health Affairs suggests that number is not only dramatically too high, but that most of the popular proposals for addressing the medical malpractice problem — particularly capping damages for "pain and suffering" would do little to reduce the practice of defensive medicine.

Max Kennerly has this interesting post that sprung from a post on Kevin, M.D. about a doctor who was a victim of poor medical care.  The doctor went to a lawyer, not because she wanted money (she said) but because she wanted an apology.  The lawyer couldn’t take her case because it was not economically viable.  The doctor never got the apology she said she wanted.

I have represented patients in medical malpractice cases for 29 years.  I have been contacted many times over the years by  health care professionals to represent them in medical malpractice cases, and I am surprised to learn how little they know about the complexities of actually bringing the case.  My assumption is  that they have been taught that medical malpractice cases are routinely filed and won, and that cases are resolved based on sympathy and emotion, not laws and medicine.  Anyone with any knowledge of the system knows that is simply not true and, for every plaintiff that wins a brain damaged baby case on the basis of "sympathy" there are five cases in which plaintiffs with valid cases lose because  "Dr. Smith may have dropped the ball on this one but he is such a nice guy and volunteers as the team doctor for the high school football team."

Likewise, I am constantly amazed at how angry these health care professionals get when I  do not automatically accept their view of the case or decline a case because it is not economically viable.  Let me recount a recent example. Note:  to avoid any risk of someone recognizing this event or the people involved, the gender of those involved may or may not be correct and the facts of the underlying event may or may not have been altered.  Those portions of the post that go over the discussion with the prospective client are accurate.