Category: Malpractice

A medical malpractice lawsuit is just words: Actions speak louder than words

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…

18 words in medical records that restore principles in a medical malpractice lawsuit

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…

Self-governance in the medical profession and medical malpractice

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…

How doctors can minimize harm: the essential duties of patient care

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 …

Shortcomings of plaintiff attorneys in Byrom vs. Johns Hopkins

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…

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…

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…

Inside the courtroom: a doctor’s battle against a fraud investigation [PODCAST]

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes! We sit down with Muhamad Aly Rifai, a practicing internist and psychiatrist, to explore the complexities of health care fraud investigations and the profound impact these …

Sham peer review (SPR): strategies for saving your career and soul

For an introduction to SPR, click here. For a history of SPR, click here. To learn how to distinguish real vs. sham peer review, click here. We don’t hear about SPR as often as it occurs because those who have experienced it have likely signed no…