The Litigation Stress Syndrome

The most significant problem with malpractice litigation is the high personal toll it takes on the physician, his family, staff, and oftentimes his other patients. For doctors to do what they do, it is necessary for us to have a strong sense of self, a firm confidence that we know what is best for the patient and that we will make things better for the patient at all times. I am reminded of this whenever I am explaining to a young couple in the middle of the night in the emergency room why it is necessary for me to take their 6-year-old only child to surgery for an emergency appendectomy. The difficulty with this premise is it assumes we posses a degree of control over the patient disease and circumstances that we do not have. It also assumes a level of infallibility that we do not have.