Luck (or being unlucky) sometimes plays a role in medicine, as DB points out. Lawyers usually use this fact to their advantage:
Of course, malpractice lawyers do not believe in luck. As an obstetrician told me yesterday, a bad infant outcome is always blamed on the obstetrician, while most bad outcomes really represent bad fortune.
Related posts:
- "Medicine is knowledge, judgment, experience and luck"
- Some lawyers say defensive medicine isn’t real, but this doctor shows us otherwise
- Alternative medicine "exists in an alternate universe from real medicine"
- More tests does not mean better medicine
- Dr. SSS: The two most expensive words in medicine
- Defensive medicine in the news
- Defensive medicine op-ed reaction
KevinMD.com on Facebook
{ 3 comments }
It is the obstetricians fault. 100% of Births in the US should be by C-section. Women should be forced to travel to anopther country if they want a natural vaginal delivery. Why should an obstetrician risk anything when the outcome if a “bad baby” is born is so profitable for lawyers? Then again, anyone who goes into OB-GYN these days is either naive or has a serious gambling and risk-taking problem. The local slimeball sodomite just made 1.5 million dollars on the latest CP case. Without a Trial! Don’t just give money away like that. Slice and dice!
“a bad infant outcome is always blamed on the obstetrician,”
It is? Every one? Really?
Is the truth just not something you guys are interested in anymore?
The problem is the lax enforcement of the rules of evidence governing expert testimony when it comes to application to clinicians. This serves them well in PI cases in which they can parrot, with the claim of authority, the history provided to them by their ltigant/plaintiff. It works against them when other junk science clinicians use the same unscientific correlations and anecdotes and peddle it as causation in medical malpractice cases. The rigorous application of the tenets of Daubert or any of its progeny would invalidate clinical causation testimony on almost every case except for those in which a signiture diagnosis was present based on objective measures (poking the patient in the rear and asking them if it hurts is by no means objective)and in which the exposure level of the particular injurious factor could be determined. One wonders what the potential error rate is in relying on a litigant regarding the source of their subjective complaints and utilizing purely subjective orthopaedic/neruological testing when it comes to determining the cause of an objective structural injury?
Comments on this entry are closed.