Dangerous doctors are not disappearing

Thanks to Jack in the comments section for bringing to my attention an amazing story in the Birmingham News this week that confirms my suspicions that doctors who get sued frequently are ones patients ought to avoid. The story profiles a doc who was sued more than 100 times in West Virginia in a single year and who had a long history of killing and maiming patients.

According to the story, after losing his license in several other states, the doctor turned up at a clinic in Birmingham and managed to nearly kill a woman who  had gone to see him for a simple skin infection by giving her an overdose of an anti-nausea medication. The stories from West Virginia are equally harrowing. One plaintiff alleges the doctor unnecessarily amputated her leg. The doctor allegedly performed unnecessary back surgery on another patient that resulted in a fatal infection. The complicity of the state medical boards and the hospitals and clinics who hired the doctor are themselves an argument for the continuing need for medical malpractice lawsuits.

Comments

[Ted]

Overlawyered covered his case on August 29.

Also, he's not a medical doctor, he's an "osteopath."

[Aaron]

You mean [url=http://www.overlawyered.com/2006/08/damned_if_you_do_damned_if_you_3.html]this post[/url]? You put a somewhat different spin on the story. You almost sound like you would want the results of peer review to be public, such that past employers could not hide a doctor's history.

A possible solution which would allow doctors to keep their peer review secrets would be to use public coroner's inquests in cases where litigious but incompetent doctors might otherwise intimidate their timid employers from reporting facts about their incompetent treatment of patients.

[PWN3D!!!]

Sounds to me like all the law suits in the world don't stop bad doctors.

They may stop good ones, though.