Continuing on in my series of posts about Medicine and the Law, we’ve established that there are two elements necessary for a patient-physician relationship to be established — contract and consent. There must be a written or implied contract in place, and there must be agreement to it on both sides (either written, verbal, or implied through actions). Now we get to the juicy part of the equation — Medical Malpractice. Read more →

Some people have questioned why I blog as a physician and why I blog anonymously. For those of you who haven’t kept up with the medical news, there have been a handful of lawsuits recently where physicians blogged about their patients anonymously. In one case, a physician was being sued for malpractice by a patient. When the blog was discovered by opposing counsel, the physician abruptly settled the case out of court. I suspect it had nothing to do with the actual case itself but that the physician’s counsel felt that the blog undermined the physician’s defense. Read more →

There’s an interesting case going on in Louisiana that’s pushing the limits of the definition of medical malpractice. For those of you that don’t know, the jurisdiction for medical malpractice in the United States is held by each state. That’s right, what is malpractice in California might not be malpractice in Texas.

In general, there is reasonable consensus about the definition of medical malpractice. For instance, if you operate on the wrong limb or the wrong patient, then most states will consider that malpractice. However, the more rare the situation, the more grey the definition becomes. Read more →

Legislation in Massachusetts has been proposed this year that would require licensed hospitals to make video and audio recordings of all surgeries. If you were a patient having surgery, would you want your surgery to be videotaped?

As you can imagine, this piece of legislation has met strong opposition from physicians. Among the reasons cited by physician opponents is the intent of the policy. Some feel that it is an imposition on the physician-patient relationship. Read more →