Here’s a medical negligence case that has just been decided in Australia. I thought it might serve as an interesting basis for further discussions on the issue of tort reform, malpractice insurance, etc. I know there’s at least one other thread on the issue right now, but i didn’t want to hijack that one with this case.
I wasn’t quite sure how i felt about this after reading that first paragraph. I’m not a fan of frivolous lawsuits, but at the same time i think doctors should be held accountable in some way if they mess up.
But then i read this:
I’m no doctor, and i don’t know to what extent doctors are taught to rely on information given them by their patients, but surely this woman must bear some of the blame for telling her doctor that she was missing a fallopian tube that was, in fact, still in place and apparently fully functional.
Are there any doctors out there who could give an idea of how easy (or difficult) it would be to perform a tubal ligation on the left side without noticing whether or not the right tube was still there or not? What procedures of information-gathering and physical examination should a doctor perform when s/he is told something like this?
Also, the article makes no mention of whether abortion was an option for this woman. Did she not realize she was pregnant until too late? Is she opposed to abortion for moral and/or religious reasons? Did she want to keep the child, but decide to sue later on just to get some money?
There are also interesting questions about the “value” of children. One of the dissenting judges complained that a human life should not have an expense value attached to it in this way.
So, what do you folks think about this whole thing?
This has happened in other countries as well, AFAIK in France and The Netherlands. The precise amount of damages may vary, but that the doctor will have to pay some damages has been ruled by various judges. IIRC there was talk of a specific law in France that would prohibit an award of damages in this case (it may even be enacted law already, but I may also recall this incorrectly).
Abortion and adoption may not be options for this particular couple, nor should they be asked to make those choices. They went in for sterilization, seems the operation didn’t take. If this was due to a problem with the doctor’s performance of his duties then the doctor bears some responsibility for the couple remaining fertile instead of being rendered sterile. As a result of that failure, there is now a baby. Arguing that the couple should have taken unusual measures(abortion or adoption) to allieve themselves of the responsibility they were faced with as a result of the doctor’s actions seems kind of callous. Why should they have to act to clean up his mistake, especially when it may cause them emotional, financial, and/or physical distress? Abortion and adoption aren’t decisions made lightly nor are they as trivial as what type of cereal to eat one morning.
The court found that the doctor screwed up. As a result the couple was faced with a responsibility they had specifically tried to avoid, and probably would have avoided if it weren’t for the Dr’s mistake. Saying they should accept this responsibility with no recompense from him simply because they weren’t willing to take the extraordinary measure of etiher abortion or giving the child up for adoption seems disengenous.
I fired a bullet at someone, they didn’t duck, they died. Their fault.
You can’t just declare that “the court found that the doctor screwed up” and accept it as a truism.
That’s what we’re debating.
If the woman gave false medical information (even if she thought it was true, that was still her mistake) than it was her fault. If she wasn’t sure if her tube was intact or not, she could indicate that to the doctor and I’m sure he could test to make sure.
If a doctor asks me about my medical history and I tell him I have no history of heart disease (when I actually do) he may prescribe something that is dangerous to my health. How is that his fault?
I’m not saying the court was right to find that. That is open for debate as far as I’m concerned. But it actually is a fact the court DID find the doctor screwed up. The case is over, the awards have been awarded. Appeals may be possible, but the statement that the court found negligence is true.
I’m just addressing the side issue stpauler seemed to be raising that the doctor bears no responsibility because the couple decided to have and raise the child(as opposed to aborting or giving it up for adoption).
If I could, I’d like to ammend that last bit. It seemed stpauler was claiming doctor bears no responsibility regardless of if he was or was not, in fact, negligent because the couple decided to have and raise the child(as opposed to aborting or giving it up for adoption).
Speaking as a doctor, I think the doctor screwed up. Unless he had old medical records on the woman, specifically an operative report documenting the removal of the one tube, or hystio-salpingogram documenting the tube’s absence, the doc should NOT have failed to look for the other tube. Taking the patient’s word only on her past medical history in elective surgery is not the best policy. As long as he was in there, he should have looked. IMHO.
Trust your patients, but only so far. A lot of medical histories given by the patient contain big factual errors, which the patient may believe to be the truth. That’s just the way it is.
I just don’t get it. Why did she tell the doctor she had her right fallopian tube removed, when it was actually still there? Did she lie, or was she under the impression that it had been removed? It makes no sense without the back story.
"So Suzy, this is why we refer to your little brother Johnny as the ‘Cash Cow’ " :rolleyes:
I think that there has been cases where a tubaligation op were done and the women still has gotten pregnant (anecdotalcite), but it still doesn’t excuse medical negligence.
Mind you, a court order to pay for the kid until he’s 18 seems like Cruel and Unusal Punishment.
If you ask me, the fact that the couple decided to keep it should mean the doctor doesn’t owe the child anything. The doctor owing is based on the supposed fact that he parents didn’t WANT more/any children. If this were true, then abortion/adoption would be their preffered actions at this point. The fact that they want to keep a child when they were supposedly preventing themselves from ever having any seems a bit contradictory.
I think your wrong on this. Its much different to not want additional children and giving away or killing a child to achieve that goal. I’m no doctor so I am not qualified to comment but I really think that if I was in that situation I would have either confirmed that the other tube was gone or took a gander when I was operating.
No, the doctor is at fault (as the case is presented anyway) because he did not exercise due diligence in his duty to perform elective sterilization. It was the physician’s duty to verify that both ovaries were isolated from the uterus when the MD agreed to do the procedure.
Thanks QtM. This is the sort of thing i was wondering about in the OP. It certainly seems clear that the doctor should have taken more precautions than he did in order to ascertain the exact condition of his patient. I know, for example, that while i’m pretty up on my own medical history (which is rather unremarkable), i couldn’t give an exact account of everything that might be relevant to a doctor’s disgnosis.
Still, i’m finding it difficult to understand how anyone could be unsure as to whether or they had had a fallopian tube removed.
I guess one of the big points against it being the Dr’s fault is
So given that:
1)Why isn’t the patient at fault for not saying “while you’re looking under the hood, can ya double check that the righty is fixed?”?
2)Why isn’t the original Dr part of the litigation? If that’s what he/she told Mrs Melchior, shouldn’t that Dr. be responsible too?
3)Let’s say that the kid dies at 9 years old, does the Dr get a pro-rated refund?
My other big point (and one I’m sticking by) is the abortion/adoption argument. They don’t want any kids and were set by that. Set to the point where the devalue human life down to an acceptable price…
…but just slapping a sticker tag of about $100K is good and solves it all…now that seems callous.
But really, what it all comes down to is the Dr is going to have to probably pay about $10,000.00 deductible, his insurance rates will go up a bit and you’ll have a very scarred kid once he finds out that he was so unwanted that his parents had to be paid off to keep him. (Or at least that’s the way it’d be in the USA, not sure about AUS)
This seems quite an assumption to make. Perhaps they believe life begins at conception and that an abortion would be murder. Raising a child you didn’t want would certainly be the preferred action if, in your own moral viewpoint, the alternative was to become a murderer. Perhaps they believe adoption is the equivelant of child abandonment. With this viewpoint, raising an unwanted child would be the preferred action over abandoning their child. There are tons of perfectly valid reasons they may have had to choose to have and raise the child instead of opting for abortion or adoption. Ascribing a moral viewpoint onto them which presumes “abortion/adoption would be their preferred actions” is fallacious. You have no idea what they would have preferred. The evidence would suggest they either preferred to have and keep the child or that abortion/adoption were ruled out for other reasons.
The more basic fact is they were put in the position of having to make those decisions by the negligence of the doctor who improperly performed the tubal ligation. Even if she said her tube was removed when she was 15, tubal regeneration is not unheard of. I agree with Qagdop, assuming the facts are correct in the story, the doctor was negligent. The patient got pregnant after he failed to render her sterile through his own negligence. The fact that they could have taken potentially emotionally, mentally, financially, and/or physically distressing actions(abortion or giving the baby up for adoption) and managed to avert the birth of the child, thereby avoiding the costs of raising the child, does not, nor would it have if the actions had been taken, absolve the doctor of his responsibility for his negligence.