Malpractice Changed the Treatment of Patients by Doctors

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It is safe to say that in the past 20 years or so, the number of cases in malpractice litigation has increased dramatically. This has had extremely adverse effects on the way doctors choose to treat their patients, the way patients view their doctors, and how society in general views the medical profession. Litigation, it seems, has become the most common response to a bad outcome. This is especially troubling since claims of malpractice generally occur when bad outcomes are combined with "bad feelings." Doctors are therefore pressured into making some sort of defensive decisions in order to protect themselves from lawsuits. Furthermore, this use of defensive medicine may even alter a doctor’s own personal practice or the practice of their institution. Unfortunately, all doctors – regardless of the type of medicine they practice, are prone to being sued throughout their medical career. However, it does appear that those practicing “higher liability” medical professions are the most likely recipients of lawsuits. In this paper, I will explore the use of defensive medicine according to physician specialty and attempt to find their relationship to medical malpractice.
Defining the term “defensive medicine” is crucial to the understanding of my project. In its most basic form, defensive medicine is “[the] practice of medicine centering, as its primary aim, around self-protection from liability in the event of a tragic outcome, rather than affording primacy to the patient's well-being…” (Hauser et al. 1991). Defensive medicine or defensive decision-making generally requires doctors to perform unnecessary tests and treatments for their patients. Many may also avoid taking care of “higher risk” patients, which includes “patients with c...

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...limited geographic coverage, reliance on self-reports with limited sample size the extremely low response rates, limited information on physician specialty, and a lack of information on the size of payments” (Kane 2008) Though the National Practitioner Data Bank does a good job in recording most cases in which a plaintiff was awarded monetary compensation on behalf of a physician, it still does not report the specialties of the physicians and does not keep any information on cases that do not result in a payment.
I have a personal interest in this topic. Currently, I have aspirations to go to law school and study medical law. I would like to specialize in malpractice defense, working at a hospital and protecting its doctors from incoming lawsuits. As an English major, I can use my skills in writing, research, and communication to help my clients.

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