We trust doctors with our lives, but too often we too easily assume those years in medical school and time spent in ethics classes justify trusting the man in the white lab coat.
But that’s not always the case. In Australia, Dr. Jayant Patel is serving out seven years in prison for manslaughter and bodily harm that earned him the morbid nickname “Dr. Death.”
After earning his Master’s degree in India and completing surgical studies at the University of Rochester, he was cited and fined at a New York hospital for poor surgical procedures and forced to surrender his license in Oregon in 2001. Despite his track record in the U.S., Patel was readily hired in Australia.
Although this is one example, readily hiring unqualified doctors is a problem with health systems worldwide. Sure, doctors are still human and make mistakes. But it doesn’t hurt to do a little research on a doctor before putting your life in his or her hands.
It shouldn’t be as simple as randomly choosing a name on a piece of paper from the insurance company. It should involve some work, questions and recommendations.
Studies have estimated that about 98,000 people die every year due to medical malpractice. That means you are twice as likely to die due to a doctor’s mistake than a fatal car accident. That number alone should be worth the time it takes to research a doctor.
Patients should never fear a second opinion, or asking for time to decide whether they want the surgery, or if they want that doctor to do it. Being proactive and demanding is never a bad thing when it comes to your own life.
There are websites like healthgrade.com that make it easy to look up doctors’ ratings, and anyone can contact the state medical board for further information on a physician.
Hiring standards should also be more stringent in hospitals. If a doctor has to be disciplined due to an abnormal number of patient deaths or injuries, it should be a red flag to hiring managers. There are too many lives at stake for hospitals to ignore glaring mistakes in a doctor’s history.
In our culture, we like to glamorize doctors as gritty life-savers, pushing through hours of on-call time and doing whatever they can to just help people. TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy or E.R. make us want to trust doctors implicitly, even if they don’t look like Dr. McDreamy.
However, we need to stop idealizing and start getting real. Doctors have malpractice insurance for a reason — sometimes errors happen. Yet there are patterns and repeating events, that hospital officials don’t seem to be paying attention to. A troubling seventeen percent of working doctors have seen a serious issue in their colleagues and haven’t reported it.
Start asking questions, be thorough, do your research, and, above all, put yourself first. If you hurt a doctor’s feelings, it’s not the end of the world. If they can’t save your life, maybe you can.
Fill out patient forms at amurrell@asu.edu
