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

Data indicates that there are 85,000 malpractice lawsuits filed per year. This is the status quo. What if the status quo is worse? There are other data showing that 85,000 is only the number of lawsuits represented by lawyers. There are 3.065 million a…

There are 85,000 medical malpractice lawsuits filed per year. There are 1 million physicians. Therefore, your odds as a doctor for being sued for malpractice are 8.5 percent per year, which corresponds to one lawsuit every 12 years. To make matters wor…

Fundamental in a medical malpractice lawsuit is determining whether an unfortunate outcome is an error of nature or a medical error. An error of nature results from a medical intervention that aligns with the standard of care. A medical error, on the o…

Primum non nocere, “first, do no harm,” is the prime directive of medical ethics for all physicians. It is also the first thing that comes into question when maleficence by a doctor is suspected. The standard of care is how any prudent and …

As shown in my earlier post, when prosecuting Byrom vs. Johns Hopkins Bayview Hospital with inductive reasoning, as is traditional, the medical intervention is compared to the standard of care in a very general and subjective way. The medical intervent…

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…