CJD

What a freaking joke, I cant believe anybody can honestly defend this lawsuit.

I guess the next thing we’ll hear from the lawyers is that if a machine malfunctions its the doctor’s fault too. I guess we all need to go get engineering degrees and learn how design and fix EKG machines, IV pumps, etc.

It’s interesting to me that as you so aptly point out in the academic physician discussions how little private practice docs know about their brethren in academia. But you seem entirely comfortable with the notion that physicians have a solid understanding of how the legal system works, despite most having literally no contact with the system, and almost all having never even discussed it with the experts in the field – namely the plaintiff’s lawyers.

Does this not strike you as odd?

CJD

Good call, Orac. Sometimes I get too lazy to sign. But simply because you don’t understand an analogy doesn’t mean it isn’t relevant. Most of the docs complaint was related to the waste of his time, a common complaint among doctors, as if their time is so very precious that they should be exempt from the things that take time that the rest of the world has to endure. It was merely a sarcastic comparison, and I apologize if it was too highbrow for you to catch.

As far as addressing the merits, that’s simply impossible since we only have this physician’s take on the suit. There may have been a theory that ultimately didn’t pan out. If I sent you a letter detailing my medical problem in as many words as this physician just detailed this suit, could you diagnose it and recommend a course of treatment? Probably not.

CJD

In any case, I was wondering the same thing myself. On what legal and moral grounds, specifically, could the physician be considered legally liable for this particular problem? In the end, the law said he wasn’t, but it’s so obvious that it’s ridiculous that it even made it as far as it did. If anyone was liable, it had to be the nursing home. I can’t help but notice that, in his sarcastic attack the putative Curious JD failed to address the most important point about this frivlous lawsuit:

“Plaintiff alleged the bedrail is broken. That has NOTHING to do with the doctor. But yet the doc was sued anyways. Frivolous lawsuit against the doc. Sue the nursing home maybe, but the doc is irrelevant to the bedrail.”

This is true only if you assume one out of every twenty cases is in the multimillions. Which it’s not. If, as physicians and insurers claim, it costs $100,000 to take a case to trial, and since the average malpractice payout is $300,000 or so, well, it doesn’t take a statistician to see that the 1 out of 20 claim is pure idiocy.

Another illustration of your idiocy is your claim that the nurse wasn’t sued because she didn’t have deep pockets. Since she was most likely an employee of the nursing home, she would have been covered by their insurance, and unless they were going bare, she would have been covered by it.

Seriously, how does one have such strong opinions on something they have so little understanding of?

As to Anonymous 9:16, it must be nice to be so financially secure that you could afford to stay home, or have your spouse stay home, to take care of your child. You must be a physician, because only a physician wouldn’t understand that most of the country can’t really afford to do that and pay medical bills, much less keep a roof over their heads.

As for the physician in this article – this appears to be the typical long whine over some lost time. I bet he really doesn’t like getting his drivers license renewed.