My interview series continues, this time with local litigation attorney Andrew Thompson, Esq. The topic this time is medical malpractice. I asked him a bunch of questions. He answered. See what you think.
1. In your opinion, is there a medical malpractice crisis in this country?
No. This is not even a close issue. The concept of a “crisis” or dramatic increase in the number of medical malpractice cases is ...
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Medical and surgical errors are very common in the hospital setting. They increase malpractice lawsuits, the cost of medical care, patients’ hospital stays, and morbidity and mortality. As an infectious diseases specialist for over forty years, I was not aware how common these errors are until I became a patient myself after being diagnosed with hypopharyngeal carcinoma. My initial cancer was successfully removed, but a local recurrence occurred twenty months ...
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An important study in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that misdiagnosis is more common than you might think. According to the study, almost 40% of patients who unexpectedly returned after an initial primary care visit had been misdiagnosed. Almost 80% of the misdiagnoses were tied to problems in doctor-patient communication, and more than half of those problems had to do with things that were missed in the ...
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In 2010, a surgical scrub technician named Kristen Parker was sentenced to thirty years in federal prison after allegedly diverting fentanyl from operating rooms, injecting herself with the powerful intravenous narcotic, refilling the contaminated syringes with saline, and replacing them to be used on patients. She was infected with hepatitis C, and her drug diversions infected over two dozen patients in the Denver area.
In 2012, David Kwiatkowski, also positive for ...
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Hospitals are very focused on avoiding harming patients lately. They have been moving in that direction for a long time, but with health care reform legislation, payments are on the line, which makes something that was a very good idea into an imperative.
In the year 2000, the Institute of Medicine, a non-profit organization that monitors various aspects of medical care, reported that 44,000-98,000 people died each year due to medical ...
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An apology can be a powerful statement that influences how another responds to a perceived wrong. This can be especially true within the context of a doctor-patient relationship. Yet, most physicians have been conditioned to employ a “deny-and-defend” approach to adverse medical outcomes, avoiding apologies because they believe it could imply an admission of guilt or ultimately initiate a lawsuit.
Apology in medicine is neither new or a fringe concept (currently ...
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Just as Sherry Gorman describes in her compelling post, being sued for malpractice can launch a complicated mix of often overwhelming emotions so debilitating that personal and professional lives are never the same.
Since so many physicians are sued at some point during their career—some estimates say as many as 9 out of 10 —becoming educated about the malpractice process may ...
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I’m lucky to practice in a national regional anesthesiology center, a hospital with five dedicated nerve block suites, each with the latest in ultrasound equipment, nurses trained in conscious sedation, regional anesthesiology colleagues and infrastructure to support regional practitioners. It seems like there is so much we can do for patients, but really, there is only so much a physician can do. We need a little help from the patient ...
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Wrong site surgery is never acceptable. A surgeon ought never to find himself in a situation where he has to inform the family that he just operated on the wrong body part. It is embarrassing, unprofessional, and an egregious violation of the patient/physician covenant.
That being said, we have allowed this issue to be defined entirely in terms of "systems management". And hence the ...
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Before patients can become savvy consumers of healthcare, they need information about their healthcare choices. Too often, such information is nearly impossible to get, especially when it requires doctors to give patients useful statistics about things like treatment side effects.
Since publishing Critical Decisions this fall, I have received a number of emails from readers who have recognized their own medical histories in the pages of my book. I received ...
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"A comprehensive and extremely useful roadmap for doctors."
-Eric Topol, MD, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine
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