If a doctor is sued for malpractice, that means they made a mistake. If they are performing extra tests to avoid malpractice, that means they are performing extra tests to avoid making mistakes. That is a good thing.
I'm a lawyer and have sued doctors for malpractice. Before bringing such a lawsuit, the lawyer hires an expert witness, another doctor, who testifies there is malpractice. Then, you are facing a deep-pocket insurance defense law firm. Med mal cases are costly and in some states, the damages are limited. No med mal lawyer worth their salt would bring a case unless there was clear malpractice.
Most med mal cases are failure to diagnose. That is, the doctor fails to find out what is wrong with you, and you are harmed as a result. If the doctor runs a battery of tests, however, they can properly diagnose the disease and not harm the patient. For a nominal fee, the doctor can save someone's life. This may be bad for the system as a whole, but it is good for the individual patient.
For context, a “simple” failure to diagnose case against a radiologist is going to cost me close to $20,000 out of pocket, and hundreds of hours of my time - not something I do on a whim.
A judges’s admin assistant that I frequently deal with recently retired. Someone asked her what advice she had for attorneys. Her response - don’t file med mal cases because they’re losers, and I practice in one of the top 5 “judicial hell holes” in America.
A friend of mine was a neurosurgeon (now retired) with a busy spine practice. He routinely had patients who told him they were grateful for his work and didn't feel he made any mistakes, but were suing him anyway because a lawyer convinced them they could receive a payout from his insurance company. His lawyers would settle for a certain amount which was less than the cost of defending a case in court.
>Denmark offers a radically different alternative, as do similar programs in other Scandinavian countries and New Zealand. To be sure, these countries have nationalized health care systems, unlike the public-private model in the U.S. But alternative responses to patient harm have been tried on a smaller scale. Virginia, for example, has a program designed to compensate for severe neurological childbirth injuries that is similar in some ways to the Danish system.
Common to all these programs is a commitment to provide information and compensation to patients regardless of whether negligence is involved. That lowers the bar of entry for patients and doesn’t pit doctors against them, enabling providers to be open about what happened.
So if a physician were to do every test on every patient every time, could they expect to never be sued? Would that be a good thing? “1 of everything please.”
You would go for an annual checkup and you get a CAT-scan and get cancer from it, then the doctor can say "Well, now we know you have it, you wouldnt without the test!"
> If a doctor is sued for malpractice, that means they made a mistake.
No, it means that someone has a story about an adverse outcome that they think can be blamed on the doctor making a mistake; it doesn't mean either that the adverse outcome actually occurred or that it was caused by the doctor making a mistake.
Not necessarily. Tests have costs and risks of their own. I would consider a test not justified in terms of cost and risk to be a "mistake". However doctors are far less likely to be sued for a thousand small mistakes than one big one, so they err on the side of too many tests.
If a doctor is sued for malpractice it means someone thinks there is a possibility the doctor made a mistake. After all, doctors win lawsuits sometimes too.
The doctors are ordering the extra tests to avoid the lawsuit being raised in the first place.
1. A person can be sued without being guilty in a criminal or civil sense.
2. They are performing extra tests to cover their asses, not to avoid making mistakes.
3. It is clearly not a good thing as shown by the authors of the study.