Almost ten years ago, there was a knock at the door. My children and I were playing games as it was only a few days after Christmas. All of us answered the door, and there stood a sheriff with papers. He said those dreaded words, “you are served.” As I closed the door, I tried to hold back my tears and get my kids situated in front of the TV. …
More than one in three U.S. physicians will face a medical malpractice lawsuit in their careers. As the role of advanced practice clinicians such as nurse practitioners as primary caregivers continues to grow, so too will their exposure to medical malpractice litigation. Therefore, health care providers may benefit from staying versed in the following key shifts in medical malpractice litigation:
1. Demographic shifts change courtroom dynamics. Read more…
An excerpt from Rheum for Improvement: The Evolution of a Health-Care Advocate.
Their expert witness, “Dr. Z,” was simply a hired gun willing to do their bidding for a price. He had completed only one year of a rotating internship in family practice in the 1960s. He had not done a residency and had no rheumatology training. He had not seen …
Medical-legal consulting is a great way to use your medical training in a non-clinical field that helps people. I started this field 14 years ago and have trained over 1,600 physicians to be medical-legal consultants. Most physicians do medical-legal consulting as a part-time side gig. All of the work is pre-litigation and pre-trial. I don’t act as a medical expert, and I don’t participate in medical malpractice cases.
There are over …
Doing side gigs is in vogue now. I want to tell you my story. It has to do with how one of the leading telemedicine companies ruined my career. I hope that my story will help many of you navigate this tough economy, especially those who are coming out of residency.
I started working as an independent contractor about ten years ago when it first came to the forefront. I worked …
Unfortunate outcomes are inevitable even when practicing quality medicine. Most are random events, but some are medical errors. The majority of physicians have been sued and those, who have not, will be. Common to all defendants is that the lawsuit is totally fallacious.
To be fallacious, the outcome of a medical intervention must be an unpreventable random mal-occurrence. This is the only alternative to a medical error. Nevertheless, there is a …
Most physicians have been defendants in lawsuits. Plaintiff experts almost always have a feeding frenzy. In truth, expert witnesses are held to codes of conduct about remaining objective and avoiding partisanship or advocacy. Yet, should the verdict favor defendants, these experts, except for deserving the term “hired guns,” are rarely, if ever, held accountable for their feeding frenzy, which conflicts with their ethical obligations.
I want to share my experience. I independently …
I am sure that I have post-litigation stress disorder. It does not actually exist yet as a recognized disorder, but I definitely have it.
You know what else? Countless other physicians have it too.
We don’t talk about it. Besides the fact that lawyers forbid you to speak of ongoing litigation to anyone, especially colleagues, there is such a culture of shame surrounding this subject. Although we now live in a world …
I have been a physician for 26 years. I have been a fierce patient advocate throughout my entire career. It never occurred to me that physicians do not have the same rights of citizenship that the very patients I fight for do. I always thought I lived in a democracy. Medicine is not what it used to be. Articles relentlessly speak of physician burnout as though we are responsible for …
When a patient is dissatisfied with his or her care, he or she can consult an attorney, who will enlist a physician “expert” to determine if a doctor has deviated from the standard of care and whether that deviation caused a negative outcome. Over the past decade of reviewing cases involving medical malpractice, I have identified five categories of medical error, which has improved how I care for my patients.
1. …
The pandemic has raised pressing questions around preventive measures, vaccines, and safe treatment, but it has also obscured one key lingering uncertainty for medical professionals: Where are all the medical malpractice claims?
A variety of factors create a cloud of uncertainty around when, if ever, we will see the claims we expected from the care provided just before the pandemic, …
Every death related to anesthesia is a tragedy; even more so when a minor procedure such as a colonoscopy leads to a completely unexpected death. Everyone knows that open heart surgery carries a mortality risk, but few of us walk into the hospital for a colonoscopy thinking that death is a plausible outcome.
We know so few facts at this point about what happened on January 21 at Beaumont Royal Oak …
As many of you know, burnout is an increasingly serious problem for physicians, affecting over 50 percent of clinicians in some studies conducted before our current COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, in an interesting study, one of every four physicians is looking to do some non-clinical work, in part, to ease the stress of today’s clinical practice.
In one survey just completed, more than 48 percent of physicians reported that since the …
If you are a doctor (or med student/health professional) and are human, you’ve probably made a medical mistake. You’ve probably not received emotional support for the mistake. Maybe you’ve never told anyone about a mistake that still haunts you today.
The truth is that almost all physicians have admitted to medical mistakes sometime in their careers. Depending on the patient outcome, many doctors carry the distress of medical errors for months, …
Ever since the publication of the infamous 2016 BMJ opinion piece claiming medical error should be considered the third leading cause of death in the U.S., the debate on the true incidence of deaths caused by medical error has been raging. Many, including me, felt the estimate of 251,000 deaths per year from medical error was grossly inflated. For example, the paper extrapolated the number of deaths from …
I am a middle-aged, full-time emergency physician, and part-time law student. Usually, I practice medicine during the day and attend law classes in the evening. Sometimes I have law classes in the afternoon or early evening then work in the emergency department all night.
So, what’s harder: medical school or law school?
Absolutely the most common question I am asked by physicians, attorneys, and students at all levels of training.
The other most …
An excerpt from Technology and the Doctor-Patient Relationship.
As disturbing as the structure of malpractice insurance is in America, a more significant problem is the defensive style of medical practice it induces. In a large-scale survey done by Jackson Healthcare in 2010, between 73-92% of physicians self-reported ordering unnecessary …
The one thing doctors want to avoid like the plague is a lawsuit — a medical malpractice lawsuit.
To be sued means the doctor loses precious time from work, endures emotional personal and family distress and is unable to fully invest oneself in providing the very best medical care possible. It is a dark cloud that hovers over the majority of physicians at least once in their lives. Some medical specialties, …
“In a case that could have wide-reaching implications for medical practice in Minnesota, the Minnesota Supreme Court issued a ruling on April 17 in the case of Warren v. Dinter holding that the existence of a physician-patient relationship is not a prerequisite for a medical malpractice action. Rather, a person may sue a physician for malpractice – even if that person was not a patient of the physician – if the harm …
A New Mexico woman, suffering from Dercum’s disease (adiposis dolorosa) which causes painful fatty tumors, is suing a Santa Fe hospital and an emergency physician claiming she was the victim of two negligent acts in 2016.
One, according to the Albuquerque Journal, she told hospital personnel she was allergic to Dilaudid but went into cardiac arrest after receiving an injection of the drug.
Two, despite the presence of a lawfully …
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