Maryland Medical Malpractice Attorney Blog

If you are interested in taking a honest look at the medical malpractice problem in Maryland and around the country, Philip G. Peters, Jr' s 2007 Michigan Law Review Article "Doctors and Juries" is a must read. The article concludes with this:

In recap, the data demonstrate that juries treat physicians very fairly, perhaps with too much deference. Given the limits of human capacity to reconstruct past events and the inevitable subjectivity of judgments about the quality of past performance, it is probably not possible to design a fault-based adjudication system that will have a substantially higher agreement rate in the cases with weak evidence of negligence. At most, modest improvements may be possible through careful refinements of trial procedure and the supervision of expert witnesses. As a consequence, both piecemeal reforms and more fundamental alternatives to malpractice litigation should not be driven by the mistaken assumption that juries treat physicians unfairly. Although the current system of resolving malpractice claims has many shortcomings, neither randomness nor favoritism toward injured patients is among them.

A recent Jury Verdict Research study looking at cancer injuries involving negligence found that the average compensatory award is $4,147,526 (median is $2,052,500). Most of these cancer cases involve medical malpractice lawsuits for the failure to diagnose cancer.

One medical malpractice study found that 12% of the time, cancer is misdiagnosed because a doctor or other health care provder either missed the signs and symptoms of cancer and did not order further testing or because the cancer test was improperly excecuted, read, or an error was made with at the lab or with the radiologist. With breast cancer patients, mammograms have a false-negative - malignant cancer that goes undetected- rate of approximately 10%.

Medical malpractice costs comprise less than 1 of overall health costs. In 2002, medical related costs rose amost 10% to $1.5 trillion. Yet malpractice premiums expeditures were only $9.6 billion – making malpractice costs about .62 percent of national health care expenditures.

First, I grant you, this is old data. But, if anything, medical costs rising a lot faster than malpractice verdicts, which are reported to be falling in many jurisdictions (for example, Texas). Doctors claim defensive medicine costs are not included in this number. But I've always said I think most doctors do what is best for the patient as opposed to worrying about malpractice lawsuits. And a lot of "defensive medicine" is just good medical care.

A Sand Diego jury has awarded $3.7 million to a man who sued a doctor for failing to diagnose the iron-overload disease hemochromatosis.

Plaintiff went to his workers' compensation doctor who found increased ferritin in his blood, an indication of hemochromatosis. No diagnosis was made. Three years later, the diagnosed with hemochromatosis. Alleging tissue and organ damage, arthritis and memory loss, Valentine said that Kramer failed to diagnose and treat his hemochromatosis, failed to refer him to a specialist and failed to discuss the lab results with him. The workers' compensation doctor alleged that he showed the Plaintiff the lab results and told him to see a primary care doctor.

This CNN.com article is a little old, but it is an interesting story of one doctor's struggle to find a medical malpractice lawyer to bring a medical malpractice lawsuit against her doctor.

No one talks about this tragedy: victims who cannot bring a malpractice lawsuit only because the economics of medical malpractice cases do not allow lawyers to take cases where the injuries are not extreme.

The article includes a very poorly worded quote from medical malpractice lawyer: "What are her losses -- maybe $50,000? I can't afford to take a case that recovers $50,000. My expenses would likely be more than the recovery. She's out of luck." True statement, I guess. Awful way to put it.

Our law firm generally avoids dental malpractice claims because the injuries - while often incredibly significant to the patient - typically do not involve the kind of permanent injuries that are required for a malpractice case. Interestingly, I stumbled across data that indicated that there were 766 dental malpractice payments made in Maryland between 1990 and 2003. That is almost 5 claims a month which is more than I would have thought. I wonder (1) how many of these dental medical malpractice claims in Maryland involved a lawyer, (2) what the average dental malpractice settlement is in Maryland, and (3) how many claims were settled without a lawyer.

In a series of articles, the Irish Independent underscores that the varying quality of radiologist in detecting breast cancer varies wildly for hospital to hospital is not a uniquely Maryland or American phenomenon. A radiologist investing what appears to be a breast cancer misdiagnosis epidemic in some hospitals in Ireland found after reviewing 3,000 mammograms that the breast cancer misdiagnosis rate at Portlaoise Hospital was six times higher than in the best hospitals in Ireland. Apparently, the breast cancer misdiagnosis rate at this hospital was 6% which is ridiculously high.

This underscores that how important it is to have radiologist reading mammograms that know how to and having equipment that gives you the best possible reading.

Overlawyered has a post today from the Happy Hospitalist on defensive medicine. You can find my thought in the comments of the Overlawyered post. The commenter Deoxy seems like a nice enough guy (I think guy, anyway) who believes what he believes. But he engages in the one practice that I hate when debating medical malpractice damage caps or other malpractice tort reform related issues: everyone who does not agree with me is stupid and not looking at the issues. Because wherever you come out on this issue of medical malpractice tort reform, I can find someone smarter than you and I who does not agree with you.

By the way, this is ostensibly from a medical doctor. Which makes me wonder why all of the advertisments and, in particular, the survey as to whether women hate sex. New rule: no more commenting on blogs that have advertisements and surveys like this.