Quote:
Originally Posted by Spoon Man
PPeople will find a way to sue a doctor, because its a way to get a lot of cash in a relative short period of time.
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It's not just greed.
When people are hurt and grieving, they want it to be *somebody's* fault, and it's soothing to be able to say to the doctor, "if YOU had done your job right,
this wouldn't have happened." Whether or not it's true.
Medicine is a limited resource, has always been a limited resource. We have never had enough money to run all the tests, enough skilled surgeons to perform all the surgeries, enough nurses at all hours to make sure all the right questions get asked and all the symptoms get identified. Some of the could-have-beens are a result of those limitations, and some are not--and everyone wants to believe that their own loss should've been less.
That their leg was amputated because the doctor was rushing to get done in time for his golf game, not because the crime rates in the city make it impossible to hire enough doctors to cover all the gunshot wounds that hit the emergency rooms. That the cancer wasn't treated because the doctor was careless & didn't notice it early enough, not because the seven hundred possible early symptoms are the same as many other diseases, and we can't afford to run CAT scans & MRIs on every patient who's got a headache.
Sometimes it's obviously malpractices; sometimes it's obviously not; sometimes it's not obvious (the hospital is understaffed *and* the doctor was trying to get to a golf game 'cos he'd been working for 36 hours straight; which fact is more important?)