American Medical News writes an article about an important topic: how doctors emotionally deal with malpractice lawsuits. Let’s be honest, medical malpractice lawyers on both sides of the “v” largely ignore this issue.
But, speaking of being honest, this article is anything but honest. It profiles three doctors: (1) a doctor who gets a defense verdict where the doctor speaks of the difficulty between juggling his practice and his court appearances (like there are really that many – please), (2) a bit defendant who got dismissed, and (3) a doctor that got hit with a big, whopping $100,000 verdict who claims to have done nothing wrong.
The doctors who are really suffering – that the article ignores – are the decent people that make an honest mistake and suffer through the pain of that mistake (and being held accountable for it). In particular, I feel for doctors who know they screwed up, won’t even serve as an expert in their own defense, but are puppets to the malpractice insurance carriers who won’t let them admit a mistake because they want to minimize their payout.
This doctor is conspicuously absent from this article.