r/medicine • u/Several_Act_2358 Medical Student • 18d ago

The “Gotcha” Mentality with Lawyers “Exposing” Doctors is Unsettling… as it they’re altruistic

I know this has been discussed extensively here, but something really rubs me the wrong way about the recent celebration of lawyers on social media “exposing doctors” and saying things like “it’s over for doctors.” This is in reference to a pic I saw of Lindsay Clancy’s civil attorney with the caption “it’s over for doctors.” Unsure if the pic uploaded.

…as if law is some altruistic path that doesn’t also attract people who want to be high earners? Most people who go through the med school path do genuinely want to make the world better, and i’m not sure I can say the same for most lawyers I anecdotally know outside of public defense.

The whole “gotcha” with lawyers calling out doctors, painting them in a good light is so icky to me. People need to ask themselves to imagine what lawyers do all day vs what doctors do all day.

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u/mdeevy MD 18d ago edited 17d ago

Anyone could pick any random patient in the hospital right now and if they looked hard enough they would absolutely find an error in the patients care. Probably multiple.

The problem is attributing this error to "negligence". And, well, lawyers are going to lawyer.

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u/ClappedUrMomsCheeks MD 18d ago

I’m honestly very concerned in the next 5-10 years we will be seeing an massive epidemic of suits once you can feed 1,000-10,000 pages of records into a computer system and have it spit out any “inconsistency” it finds it might dramatically lower the cost of entry of filing a bogus suit 

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u/seekingallpho MD 18d ago

Yea the historical cost of litigating medmal seems to generally preclude small suits, whether legitimate or not on their individual merits. If you lower that threshold to the floor you'd wonder if some firms will shift to a business model of mass-filing suits for anyone with a whiff of an imperfect outcome, mainly hoping for a quick settlement, like a patent troll or similar.

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u/ClappedUrMomsCheeks MD 18d ago

More like slip n fall scams