<span itemprop="author">Howard Smith, MD

Author's posts

When medical malpractice is not medical malpractice

In medical malpractice, inductive reasoning regards the standard of care as the duty to do no harm. If there is a complication from a medical intervention and the medical intervention differs from the standard of care in any conceivable way, the differ…

How flawed legal reasoning can tilt medical malpractice cases

A quote by Sir Winston Churchill: “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” Actually, Churchill never said this. It may have been Ian Gilmour, a member of Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet, years after C…

Nurse practitioner hit with $1.4m verdict: the hidden truth behind the lawsuit

In the August 2023 issue of MD Linx, Stephanie Srakocic writes about a Philadelphia jury that awards a $1.4 million verdict against a nurse practitioner for failing to treat hyperthyroidism. The patient, who is hyperthyroid, is admitted to the hospital…

Refuting the notion by a plaintiff attorney that there are no frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits

James Haliczer, an erstwhile defense attorney turned plaintiff attorney, audaciously claims in a YouTube video that “there is no such thing as a frivolous lawsuit.” There are ten species of stakeholders in medical malpractice litigation: cl…

Is your medical malpractice case just a coin toss?

If you are embroiled in a medical malpractice lawsuit today, you are in a difficult situation. Your lawsuit is one of 85,000 medical malpractice cases filed each year. Regardless of what your defense counsel tells you about merit, no one truly knows ho…

How hypothesis testing could slash legal costs

There are 85,000 medical malpractice lawsuits filed annually. Among them, 52,190 are summarily dropped for reasons unknown; 26,860 are settled; 1,190 result in plaintiff verdicts, and 4,760 in defense verdicts. Only 33.3% of these lawsuits are likely t…

How physicians can fix media bias with science

The assassination attempt is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The “gaslighting” is over. The rules for truth by legacy media are never examined for objectivity. We do not have the Inquisition in the United States; we have the l…

The truth about medical lawsuits: What the numbers reveal

For two years, I have used this venue to expose medical malpractice litigation as a serious threat to society and the medical profession. From your responses, I conclude that patients and doctors are ready for a paradigm shift. Two elements are essenti…

The flaw with medical malpractice litigation

There is a serious flaw in medical malpractice litigation, and it is not what you may think. My post about a hypothetical medical malpractice case is not hypothetical but emblematic of the flaw. Medical staff at a major hospital in Washington, DC, did …

Why most medical malpractice claims never see a courtroom

In my research on the case selection criteria used by plaintiff medical malpractice attorneys, one very prominent plaintiff attorney in Maryland spills the beans. He proudly proclaims, “We, who are plaintiff attorneys, take on medical malpractice…