“First there is gross error that caused three deaths at Duke (one, the patient; two, the person who should have got the first heart that she got; third, the person who would otherwise have got the <i>second</i> heart she got).”
How’d you figure that ANY of these three deaths were CAUSED by doctors or by any other medical professional? These people died because their hearts failed. That’s what killed them. Not having a working heart is inconsistent with life. If any of them had a functioning heart of their own, they wouldn’t have been on a transplant list in the first place. They’d be home safe from hospitals and doctors. You can’t say they were killed by the doctors. All you can say is that the doctors might possibly have been able to prolong the lives of one or more of them had the medical people involved not bungled things so badly.
I don’t know about the Lehman case, but many people (half?) who receive cancer chemotherapy are going to die of their cancer despite the therapy. So if a screwup ends their life 6 months or 6 years early, it’s a serious medical error but not, in my book the same as when a perfectly healthy person gets run over in a zebra crossing.
How about comparing medical errors with military errors? That is equally difficult. What percentage of soldiers die in battle becuase of their commanders’ errors? If a platoon gets wiped out because their commander didn’t underestimated the enemy can we say they were killed by their commander?
yeah, in the transplant case, the fault is lain directly on the transplant personnel, and the transplant physician in charge. Yes, the girl was suffering from a heart defect that would eventually probably have killed her; But it had not done so yet. What the doctor did to her was incompatible with life; It was a clear case of malpractice. Rather than give her a chance at life, which is what was promised, he gave her death that was far more certain than that which she had with her original heart disease.
“Yes, the girl was suffering from a heart defect that would eventually probably have killed her…”
Exactly, this was not a person destined (in the absence of an heroic intervention) for a real life. This was a person who was expected to have a miserable and short life and to avoid that fate a lot of people invested a lot of time and money to get her into the U.S. and into the hands of the transplant team at Duke. This was not a healthy teenager with a real life ahead of her and I think that needs to figure into the equation.
How about another thought experiment. A child has a condition that has been regarded as universally fatal but a macho surgeon thinks she can save the child’s life with a procedure that has been tested only in animals. The surgeon explains that the procedure is technically extremely difficult and the chance of success is not more than 10% but in the absence of the experimental surgery the chance of the patient living more than 1 week is less than 0.01%. The parents agree. During the procedure, a medical student outside the operating room drops a book causing a loud noise which startles the surgeon causing her to nick an artery causing uncontrollable hemorrhage and the death of the paient. So did the medical student kill the patient? Did the surgeon kill the patient? Did the parents who agreed to the dangerous procedure kill the patient?
QtM, you are certainly correct that the Duke team are much MORE culpable than the theoretical surgeon and that the teenage patient had a GREATER chance of living LONGER than the theoretical child, but these are quantitative differences. I don’t see how you can claim that there is a qualitative difference.
