I give up...
 

Why bother rolling my eyes anymore.....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070724/...wrongful_birth

This goes to prove that only 10% of doctors graduated in the top 10% of their class.

What I'm seeing from this is:

"We had a second kid that also has genetic defects, therefore it's your fault for not doing the diagnosis right so we could kill him off, so now we're going to ruin your life, put you out of your practice, and take everything you own."

What utter non-sense...so if a child in the womb is determined to have some disability then termination or murder is ok? and the doctor should be sued?I think really the wife should pay the husband because I'm sure it will be determined that it was "Her" genes that were at fault...

Sounds like Gattaca...Sounds like B.S....Whoopie at your own Risk!

I would consider it irresponsible on the part of the parents, not to have a genetics test if they have a child with a disability.

If they had known about the disease, they might never have gotten pregnant in the first place.

The doctor told them they could have a normal child.

"Instead, Kousseff, a specialist in genetic disorders, told them they should be able to have normal children in the future."

He is not a simple pediatrician, he is a genetics specialist.

It depends on how easy it would be to misdiagnose such a problem.

If the doctor was truely neglegent then I believe he is at fault. He was apparently 90 % neglegent but what the hell does that mean? You're either neglegent or not, it's not a percentage. :nope:

I wouldnt want a messed up kid. I'd have it aborted too... I feel bad for the parents.

so because a doctor made a misdiagnosis he deserves to lose his livelihood and have his life ruined?

nah, I don't think its a situation that you can lay the blame on anyone.


They should have thrown it in the trash and said someone kidnapped it. Then forget about it and try again. But they decided to make a stink.

It should not come as a surprise to anyone that one doctor's opinion is the same as a solid fact, and I think the parents should have been aware of that. Perhaps they should have weighed up the possible risks in that knowledge and considered adoption instead, as god knows there are enough children in the world that could do with some help.

I really don't know anyone who hasn't at some point been either incorrectly diagnosed by a doctor for one thing or another, they are not omnipotent and even the best doctors in the world cannot know everything. Many years ago I had to pay a specialist to track down an ailment I had, which had been variously diagnosed by numerous doctors both up and down the country as everything from a dose of the clap to an allergic reaction, and it turned out in the end that it was a side-effect from having had malaria some years before, picked up whilst abroad.

Another time after I had had an horrific motorcycle accident, where I was very badly injured, amongst the many injuries I'd ended up with and treatments I received, my jaw was wired up with something called a 'bilateral suspension', which is apparently not done very often. When it was time to remove the wires, the specialist that had performed the original procedure on me was away on holiday, so another doctor, unfamiliar with the intracasies of such an arrangement, made a mistake and cut one of the escape wires, meaning I was forced to have another operation in order for them to remove the wires that were left in. When this happened, the doctors at the hospital invited me in to explain this, and it was obvious that they were terrified I was going to sue them for negligence. When I pointed out that I was hardly likely to sue someone who about a month before had quite literally saved my life, they were obviously relieved, but they did tell me that many people would have seen it as a way to get rich and probably ruin their careers in the process. How people can live with doing things like that and profiting from what is a mistake is beyond me though.

Anyone who claims they've never made a mistake or missed something is a goddam liar, and making a mistake is not the same as being carelessly negligent.

:D Chock

Excellent post:up:

It has to go well beyond of "mistake" for a jury to find the doctors negligent though.

I have sat through a malpactive trial before. An 18 year old boy had a simple operation. After the sugery, when the boy was home, he started to develop a high fever.

His mother called the hospital about half a dozen times over the next couple of days. The doctors said it was normal after surjury. Repeatedly.

Long story short, the 18 year old boy ended up with the body of an 80 year old man.

But because his symptoms were common after surgery, the doctors were no found negligent. Regardless of how many times the mother called and begged them to readmit their son into the hospital.

The judge gives very precise instructions to the juries in these cases. I would like to know all the facts of the case, because if they found him guilty of negligence, chances.

this is a legal system that awards people huge amounts of money for stuff like spilling hot coffee on themselves, or suffering a broken rib during cpr

But where does mistake end and negligence begins?

As I suggested in my previous post, I think the negligence begins with the parents taking one person's word for it, despite evidence to the contrary in the form of their first child. And then seeking to solve problems, which are essentially of their own making, through the courts.

One of my friends is a medic working in a hospital with mentally ill patients (forgive the non-PC bit here, but I'm talking about some real violent nutters he has to work with). He is obviously a very caring person, because he very often has to have time off when he has been attacked by one of these unfortunates, and he's suffered some quite bad injuries too, and yet he still goes back. Both he, and many of his colleagues whom I speak to are all unanimous in their assertion that they would definitely think twice about assisting someone in the street because of the potential for legal action to be taken against them.

Now I'm not suggesting that they should be legally beyond reproach, and neither are they, but cases like the one at the start of this thread do not help matters, and people should take responsibility for their actions, in all cases, and that includes the decision to have a child when it is blatantly obvious to anyone with a modicum of intelligence that things could go potentially wrong, despite what one doctor has said. This is why when you speak to numerous doctors about things, it is referred to as a 'second opinion' and not a 'second fact'.

:D Chock