And people wonder why medical errors occur and medical software is lousy. Sorry
for your Father, your Mother and our profession. -- IV
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> 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.
