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Absolutely. You can sue for pretty much anything. Winning is another story, but doctor's don't generally make sympathetic defendants. Juries know they have m
by KMag 9y ago
Absolutely. You can sue for pretty much anything. Winning is another story, but doctor's don't generally make sympathetic defendants. Juries know they have money and that they pay huge insurance fees to cover these cases. Of course, after losing a big case where the insurance company pays out millions of dollars, they likely become uninsurable and unemployable. But hey, the money is good until you hit the anti-lottery.
My father was an anesthesiologist (who retired in good standing), and I remember him telling me a case he read about a Caesarean section. The surgeon was using an electrocautery pen to sear closed the ends of blood vessels. The surgeon set down the pen on the surgical cart, lifted the baby out, set the baby on the cart, and the baby's heel touched the pen. Now the baby has a small scar on the bottom of his/her heel for life. The parents sued the surgeon, the cart nurse overseeing the cart, and the anesthesiologist was close to the surgical cart. All 3 defendants settled out of court, since babies almost always win jury cases against rich doctors, regardless of merit.
The litigant's lawyer would almost certainly bring up a below median survival rate as evidence of a pattern of gross incompetence.
Also, of course, in the U.S., I believe only governments are immune to lawsuits (sovereign immunity) without their consent. The courts have consistently ruled that many rights, including the right to sue, cannot be legally waived by contract. In a similar way, if you sell yourself into slavery by entering into a contract that waives your right against unlawful detention, that contract cannot be legally enforced.
My grandfather was an anesthesiologist. My dad was an anesthesiologist (and did well enough on the MCAT to go to med school after 3 years of undergrad... practiced medicine without an undergrad degree... med school is too competitive today to do such a thing). I was a good student: I graduated from MIT. However, my brother and I saw all of the BS and stress (anesthesiologists have a high suicide rate) and constantly rotating sleep/work shifts and both went into engineering.
- llamaz 9y agoLet me guess, your heritage is Indian or Pakistani?
- lopmotr 9y agoIf he really had a pattern of gross incompetence, wouldn't there have been some other process to stop him doing that? Are courts really that incompetent themselves that they can't understand such simple statistical errors as using survival rate to measure competence?
- KMag 9y agoIt's not about gross incompetence; it's about a jury's perception of incompetence, colored by their perception of the doctor and their perception of the grieving family members. If it comes to a jury trial, the court relies on the jury to make legally factual findings, so the courts end up relying upon the statistical abilities of the median juror, colored by the aforementioned biases. There are medical boards to remove incompetent doctors, but those influence jury trials primarily through submissions of findings as evidence for consideration by juries. A good lawyer will portray medical boards as a bunch of doctors biased against passing judgement on fellow doctors.