Judges go to school

This innovative program may improve judging of malpractice cases. I wish everyone could read this entry, but I will excerpt some key paragraphs. Judges hit classroom to learn about medicine

“The objective in this was to give judges a feel for the span of judgment that physicians and other health care providers have to exercise when detecting, diagnosing, treating and to some extent predicting the outcome of cancer,” said Franklin Zweig, PhD, president of the Advanced Science and Technology Adjudication Resource Center, which recruited the judges who attended the program. The ongoing ASTAR/EINSHAC project is free to invited judges.

The March school was the anchor for a program participating judges have committed to attending periodically in the next two years. Future classes will branch into areas such as genetics and clinical trials. In the fall, ASTAR will invite another 125 participants.

Dr. Calvo said the goal is to show judges that most of human biology and medicine is not black and white.

And judges at the first round of classes said they learned exactly that. In addition to acquiring a scientific knowledge base, judges said they learned that understanding physician-patient communication is key to interpreting complex medical cases.

Ohio trial Judge Lee Sinclair said he was particularly enlightened by a mock exercise in which a newly diagnosed cancer patient evaluated treatment options with several doctors, including a surgeon and an oncologist.

When the judges got together to discuss the conversation, “what you realized was everyone in the room heard things in a different way,” Sinclair said. “Often what you hear in medical malpractice cases is the physician saying he explained it to the patient and the patient saying it never happened.”

The insights are especially valuable in helping judges eliminate potentially frivolous lawsuits or find alternate ways to resolve legal disputes without going to trial, said Marvin J. Garvis, a Maryland federal judge.

Whoever had this idea is brilliant. Physicians constantly are bewildered that patients and juries expect a theoretical perfection in medical care. We understand that medicine is fraught with uncertainty. We understand that our words are often either not heard or not understood. We should become better at communicating, but the problem may not be our words, but rather the mental state that the diagnosis induces in the patient.

This program should help. It is a step in the right direction.