Medical lawsuit diagnosis

When a friend told me recently he was to undergo a painful medical procedure to see if he has cancer, it reminded me of a time years ago when I faced a similar prospect. The testing in my case would have painful and risked infection.

Fortunately, it was a two-part procedure. The first part was uncomfortable but not painful or with any great infection risk.

After a young doctor had put me through this first part, an older specialist took over and examined the results – and decided against the second part of the test. My wife asked me if that meant I did not have cancer. My answer was, “No.”

“What it means,” I said, “was that the doctor weighed the alternatives and decided that the chance that I had cancer was sufficiently small, and the danger of infection from the test itself was sufficiently large, that the best choice was not to go any further.”

My wife seemed not completely put at ease by that, so I added: “Like anybody else, this doctor can be wrong. But, if it turns out that I do have cancer and die, I don’t want anybody to sue that man. Nobody is infallible and no patient has a right to infallibility.”

Sowell understands the problem of risks and benefits (a recurring theme in today’s rants). Unfortunately, lawyers argue that all risks are unnecessary. Of course, that is their job. Our job is to care for patients – and make the best possible decisions.

Sowell comments on the unintended consequences of our tort system. I agree with his analysis.

Trust between doctor and patient is not a small thing. Sometimes it can be the difference between life and death. Our laws recognize the enormous importance of that relationship by exempting doctors from having to testify to what a patient has told them, even in a murder case.

To go to these lengths to protect the doctor-patient relationship and then blithely throw it away with easy access to frivolous lawsuits makes no sense. Neither does creating a massive medical bureaucracy to pay for treatments and medication, but patients can go only to those doctors preselected by an insurance company or the government.

One of my favorite doctors retired early and spent some time explaining to me why he did so. The growing red tape was bad enough, but the deterioration of the doctor-patient relationship soured him even more.

Earlier, patients came to him because someone recommended him, and they came with a wholly different attitude from that of a patient assigned to him by an insurer. He now found a much more distrustful, if not adversarial, attitude that did neither him or his patient any good. That may be the biggest cost of our current bureaucratic and legal environment.

Related posts:

1. Thomas Sowell – no free lunch medicine
2. I admire Thomas Sowell, but …
3. About a patient with pancreatic cancer
4. Not all screening helps patients
5. Too many CT scans

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