How many times have you Googled for one purpose and then found something interesting unrelated to what you were looking for? This weekend, looking for something unrelated, I found a New Yorker article from two years ago on medical malpractice in the comments section of a blog. It is an interesting and somewhat balanced article by a doctor writing about the country’s medical malpractice problem. I disagree with his conclusions but it really is a wonderfully well-written article that points out the paradox inherent in medical malpractice cases. Three quotes in the article I found of particular interest:
“Malpractice attorneys are hardly the most impartial assessors of care, but medicine has offered no genuine alternative because physicians are generally unwilling to take financial responsibility for the consequences of their [medical malpractice]. Indeed, the one argument that has persuaded many doctors to be more forthright about mistakes is that doing so might make patients less likely to sue.”
“I watch a lot of baseball, and I often find myself thinking about the third baseman’s job. In a season, a third baseman will have about as many chances to throw a man out as I will to operate on people. The very best (players like Mike Lowell, Hank Blalock, and Bill Mueller) do this perfectly almost every time. But two per cent of the time even they drop the ball or throw it over the first baseman’s head. No one playing a full season fails to make stupid errors. When he does, the fans hoot and jeer. If the player’s error costs the game, the hooting will turn to yelling. Imagine, though, that if every time Bill Mueller threw and missed it cost or damaged the life of someone you cared about. One error leaves an old man with a tracheostomy; another puts a young woman in a wheelchair; another leaves a child brain-damaged for the rest of her days. His teammates would still commiserate, but the rest of us? Some will want to rush the field howling for Mueller’s blood. Others will see all the saves he’s made and forgive him his failures. Nobody, though, would see him in quite the same way again. And nobody would be happy to have the game go on as if nothing had happened. We’d want him to show sorrow, to take responsibility. We’d want the people he injured to be helped in a meaningful way. This is our situation in medicine, and litigation has proved to be a singularly unsatisfactory solution. It is expensive, drawn-out, and painfully adversarial. It also helps very few people. Ninety-eight per cent of families that are hurt by medical errors don’t sue. They are unable to find lawyers who think they would make good plaintiffs, or they are simply too daunted. Of those who do sue, most will lose. In the end, fewer than one in a hundred deserving families receive any money. The rest get nothing: no help, not even an apology.”
“What would most doctors do if someone close to them was hurt by a medical error? In a recent national survey, physicians and non-physicians were given the following case: A surgeon orders an antibiotic for a sixty-seven-year-old man undergoing surgery, failing to notice that the patient’s chart says that he is allergic to the drug. The mistake is not caught until after the antibiotic is given, and, despite every effort, the patient dies as a result. What should be done? Unlike fifty per cent of the public, almost none of the physicians wanted the surgeon to lose his license. Medical care requires that a thousand critical steps go right every day, and none of us would have a license if we were punished every time we faltered. At the same time, fifty-five per cent of the physicians said that they would sue the surgeon for malpractice.” Continue reading
