I have now had my first taste of medical malpractice trials. My mother has
won the malpractice case against a physician whose failure to diagnose my
father's bilateral renal carcinoma for several years caused much pain and
suffering and ultimately led to my father's death.
I was not permitted to be an expert witness in medical informatics nor in
clinical medicine due to objections from the defense that "I just do some
work with computers." I was only able to testify as an ordinary
witness.
There are many medical informatics-related issues that arose in the trial. I
will write more on this issue as time permits. However, some initial
observations:
- medical science became entirely replaced with junk science. Scientific
reasoning and methods did not apply, and medical terminology was brilliantly
and spectacularly abused and misused to mislead the jurors and create fear,
uncertaintly and doubt. I felt like I was in an Alice-in-Wonderland setting
where the defendant and his "expert witnesses" sounded as if they were
first-year medical students on hallucinogens.
- thinking errors and errors in logic were rampant on the defense side. The
kinds of things that would cause dismissal from medical school were the order
of the day.
- this defendant falsified records and perjured himself. Perhaps the fact
that he is a dept. chair and chief of staff of his hospital did not help.
Perhaps the fact that he is an attorney as well, having gone to law school
while ostensibly caring for my father, did not help.
- the defendant did not maintain adequate medical records. For this fellow
to admit under oath that discrepancies between an ultarsound report
("possible renal carcinoma") and a discharge summary ("ultrasound reported as
normal") were due to the fact that his resident dictated it and that he
routinely never reads these before signing was a bit unexpected at this point
in time. His further statement that "they hand me 60 of these things a day
and I just sign them" is not good for a dept chair/chief of staff.
- the defendant was not only medically incompetent, he was entirely
incompetent. His expert defense witness #2 provided an article from the
premier journal of the field that actually supported my mother, the
plaintiff. This article was used at the conclusion of expert defense witness
#1's testimony. When expert #1 was confronted with the article, he admitted
that "if it were his tumor, he'd have felt the standard of care was
violated." When expert #2 was later confronted with his own article, the
spin he put on his error made for a fantastic "theatre of the absurd."
The American system of medical malpratice litigation is entirely broken.
More when official transcripts become available.
S.
