Lawsuits Against Medical Professionals

Lawsuits against medical practitioners can cause traumatic stress reactions and, worse, the end of a professional career. For physicians who have spent considerable time and expense earning the right to practice medicine, an allegation of wrongdoing is a huge blow, with multiple reverberations for family, friends, and patients, and with the risk of losing one's practice. These types of lawsuits may be categorized as drug errors, birth-related injuries, surgical errors, or diagnostic errors. After a discussion of these errors, this entry presents a case illustration.

For medical practitioners, a lawsuit is a traumatic stressor that can cause irreparable harm and is comparable with what combat soldiers experience or, more precisely, what combat medics experience. Medics join the army to save people, as physicians take the Hippocratic Oath to save people and promise to do no harm. Historically the oath is taken by doctors as a commitment to practice medicine ethically and humanely. This is one of the reasons the Guantanamo Bay detention camp has received so much criticism directed at its physicians, who witnessed the results of torture. Although the military physicians may not bear culpability, the criticisms still sting.

When health care professionals are accused of wrongdoing, simply being informed of it is often devastating and discouraging and has a traumatic impact on both the provider and her or his family.

Most lawsuits happen because someone seeks to blame another (in this case a medical practitioner) for a bad outcome; one that is so bad that it motivates the grieved—both the “victim” and her or his family—to seek redress legally. Sometimes it is from greed that malpractice lawyers enable redress, which is equally motivated by both money and competition to win big and often.

According to the 2010 report released by the American Medical Association (AMA), more than 60% of doctors over the age of 55 have been sued at least once, though most lawsuits are dropped or dismissed. Indeed, the report predicts that most physicians will be sued for malpractice at some point in their careers. This works out to an average of 95 medical malpractice lawsuits having been filed for every 100 physicians now in practice. The numbers have led to a lament by AMA immediate past president D r. J. James Rohack that such a litigious climate frightens physicians and other health care professionals and their families and, in so doing, hurts patients' access to physician care at a time when the nation is working to reduce unnecessary health care costs.

The AMA surveyed 5,825 physicians using the 2007–2008 Physician Practice Information (PPI) survey. The survey helps update the practice cost data to develop practice expense relative value units (RVUs) for the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule. This schedule is the best indicator of fluctuating health care costs in the United States. In the AMA survey, the measure of malpractice claims was determined by survey questions that asked doctors about the number of claims filed against them in their careers and over the previous year; the survey did not ask about the outcome of those claims.

...