What Ophthalmologists Hate About Lawyers

Had to sift through all the Jude Law pictures to find this.

Certainly not all lawyers are bad. There will be the day when I want to join a practice or contract with an academic program, and I will most certainly want my own lawer to help me iron out the finer details. But, as a physician, there is a certain breed of lawyers which annoys us more than any other.

We all know about the lawyers who dive deep into malpractice suits. We also know they don't do what they do to increase awareness about suboptimal healthcare, or to be advocates for an unfortunate patient population. After all, I firmly believe medical negligence is no more common now than one hundred years ago, except for the fact there is much more we can do for the human state nowadays and thus much more that can go wrong. True accidents, however, probably are more common only because of all the road blocks put in place from prior law suits and our so-called government.

They're in it for the money, and are there to further and to capitalize on the litigenous tendency of our society.

A particular type of malpractice lawyer is unique to ophthalmologists - ROP (retinopathy of prematurity) lawyers. There are actually folks who specialize in this. Now, tell me. Do you really think there are eye doctors out there being deliberately negligent when screening babies for ROP? Not likely. What happens is a baby is screened, the decision is made to observe rather than do laser therapy(and legitimately so based on pretty well-defined guidelines), and the poor child's disease progresses causing visual deficit. Did anyone do anything wrong here? No. It was a proper decision paired with a bad result.

And yet, we are still sued, and the bastard lawyers win on occasion. Do you really have to ask why healthcare is so expensive in our country?