Doctors and Attorneys Can Be Friends—Part II

For those of you who have not read the comments of Dr. Kaufman to my last post, “Doctors and Attorneys Can Be Friends”, I recommend that you take a moment to do so. It is a thoughtful comment spoken from the heart by someone who clearly seems to be a caring physician. We don’t see things quite the same way but I may have found a friend! Dr. Kaufman’s comments are at least an opportunity to further identify some of what our two professions have in common.

Dr. Kaufman writes that he is a physician because: “Helping people is priceless and is the only reason left for choosing a career in medicine.” As it turns out, I chose medical malpractice plaintiff’s work as the focus of my practice for the same reason.--the opportunity to help people who are really in need of assistance and can’t otherwise afford it.” And neither Dr. Kaufman nor I are alone or exceptions in our respective practices. Yet both of us have colleagues who portray each other’s profession as an unholy group of uncaring cads who are more interested in their stock portfolios, golf games, and fancy automobiles than their patients or their clients. This decade should be more about civility and understanding between our two professions and less about malicious characterizations.

Dr. Kaufman wants me to concede that: “Frivolous lawsuits against physicians are real and they are a real problem, hiking up our med malpractice insurance and eroding our income.” I concede the first part--that frivolous lawsuits are real. Not only are they real but the medical malpractice plaintiffs’ bar dislikes them just as does the medical profession. Frivolous medical malpractice law suits give my profession a bad name. They serve to alienate the medical profession, the judges who hear them, and the general public when a frivolous law suit receives publicity. I’m sure it’s the same for the medical profession and that good physicians shudder when they read a news report of a surgeon who has cut off the wrong leg or an internal medicine physician who has used his office as a source of narcotics for users and dealers. In each instance our respective professions are being done a disservice and we each might do better policing our own if our two professions were more collaborative and shared thinking about such subjects instead of crowing over each other’s embarrassments.

But I don’t subscribe to the second part of Dr. Kaufmans’s statement that frivolous law suits are the “real problem” behind high malpractice insurance rates and the erosion of physicians’ income. I believe frivolous lawsuits are the exception, not the rule, and I do not believe there is any solid data to support Dr. Kaufman’s conclusion. So I would ask Dr. Kaufman to come half way and meet me in the middle on this. Join me in advocating for the creation of an impartial panel to investigate and provide an objective, unbiased assessment of these issues.

Finally, when you read what Dr. Kaufman wrote about “defensive medicine’, you don’t get the impression he is a doctor who is ordering unnecessary tests on patients he sees in his emergency room, particularly ones that expose the patient to risks over the long haul, because he is thinking about his own skin and protecting himself against a future law suit. Do Dr. Kaufman and other ER physician end up ordering tests that are ‘unnecessary”? Of course, but at least for the good and caring physicians it’s not because of a calculated decision about what will best serve their own personal well being. They don’t have the time to engage in that type of extraneous thinking as they deal with the needs of their patients. And I simply have too much respect for the medical profession to believe that there are any more than a handful of physicians who are regularly placing the welfare of their patient second to their own well being as they practice their profession.