I haven’t talked to a single happy coworker lately and I ineract with multiple different specialties daily. So you can have the work and don’t encourage your kids to go into medicine either. I am so busy with so many patients that I don’t need any type of advertisement or claims. I don’t need a two page glossy advertisement in the Yellow pages, TV commercial, or billboard touting my claims like a slithering trial lawyer. I don’t think I would be any less busy if I put a sign on the door that said “Caution: You may die or I may kill you in the course of treatment”

What an amazing profession. Make lots of money, don’t give people a way to rate whether you are good or bad, claim you are excellent at what you do, advocate for no liability (with increasing success), and when you do screw up, say it’s an art, not a science, and sometimes bad things just happen.

Good work if you can get it.

To get the patient, and the money, in the door, they have no problem touting their lifesaving and curing skills, but as soon as there is a problem all that anyone hears is that “there are no certainties” and “medicine is an art”, etc.”

You seem to have trouble distinguishing what individual doctors tell patients vs what hospitals and HMOs say in TV commercials.

The only people touting mammograms and that other stuff is hospitals. Individual doctors for the most part dont pimp that stuff. They advise their patients to get them perhaps, but they dont ramble on and on about how great it is. So if you want to sue somebody for false advertising, go after the person who is really making the claims. Instead you try and skew it to somebody else who didnt make those claims at all. Nice lawyer trick.

Slick move CJD to blame this mindset on tort reformers and not the continuous barrage of billboard, newspaper, radio, and TV advertising by trial lawyers that shout “I will fight for you, get what you deserve”

You are as sick and slimy as they come

Most lawyers who actually practice doing plaintiff’s work will tell you that much of their work initially is in lowering these false expectations. In the same way people want to know why they can’t get a “brain transplant”, they want to know why their soft-tissue injury that resolved in 6 weeks isn’t worth $100,000, and they’re equally upset with their lawyer as they are with the physician above.

CJD

A tragic but amusing situation taday. While trying to nicely explain to a family that a loved one was brain dead and that one treatment alternative would be to withdraw life support they were all incensed that a “brain transplant” could not be done. They then became all convinced that we would not perform this because the loved one was uninsured and was a minority. The gentleman was overweight, smoked, had diabetes and suffered anoxic brain injury after a prolonged cardiac arrest. The family wanted to know “whose fault it was” so they could sue. Some anger and incoherence is understandable during a time of mental shock, but it also does reflect on the expectation and mindset of society.

There’s only been one time I ever considered suing a doctor, and it was *not* over the outcome, it was because the guy was such a horse’s patoot. FYI, the situation involved a rather nasty medical injury, and the arrogance and stonewalling just made it worse. Ultimately I didn’t sue or even file a complaint, but like the doc in the post above this one, I sure view the system differently now.

Don’t get fooled by all the finger-pointing at advertising, the media, patient expectations and all the rest of it. At the end of the day, what it really comes down to – what we all want the most – is the human touch.