Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog

Reading some of the comments on Flea's post:

Do competetive pressures of the marketplace really cause phyicians to *promise* things won't go wrong?
It seems like a promise they can't keep with 100% certainty and one cause of legal troubles when something does go wrong.
 

Here's another excerpt from Flea's blog:
According to Flea's adversary, there are three reasons why patients become clients:

1. They want explanations for what happened to them.

The first reason makes no sense. Surely a lawsuit is not necessary to extract an explanation from a physician, is it?

My comment: unfortunately, many patients who sue do feel it's necessary to sue in order to get explanations from their doctors. They think so, ironically, because lawsuits make doctors practice defensive medicine which leads them to withhold information from patients if they think patients will be unhappy about it.

You can get some statistics on this odd trend and other costly mistakes medical groups often make in this special report we offer at
http://www.interplaygroup.com/specialreport.html
 

I agree that in fact just asking doctor's what went wrong is often frustrating for patients for reasons other than that we sometimes don't know. Many will just avoid talking to patients who have a bad outcome, and all are anxious about the idea of admiting mistakes, although I think more do it than our malpractice insurers would like.

I was taught to not put patients and families in the position where they feel that they have to sue to find out what happened, but unfortunately people will do just that sometimes.

I prefer to just tell people. The two times that I have gone to family members with the message "I made a mistake", I believe that my honest confession of error helped them to better cope with their loss. I do not know if it increased or decreased the chance of being sued and that wasn't the point. I believe the practice of medicine to be first and formost a moral enterprise and if practiced as such requires that honesty regardless of the consequences.
 

In my specialty, EM, no one comes and asks what happened. There is never that opportunity. There is no way for me to know that the long lost reletives who live across the country have questions. The first awareness of a problem is the notice of a lawsuit filed one year later. They usually have talked to someone at the barber shop who convinces them that malpractice must have occurred.