On Monday, August 6, 2018 at 6:23:35 AM UTC-7, wrote:
On Saturday, August 4, 2018 at 7:06:15 PM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 4, 2018 at 4:03:44 PM UTC-7, wrote:
On Tuesday, July 31, 2018 at 2:18:18 PM UTC-7, John B. Slocomb wrote:
On Tue, 31 Jul 2018 13:37:19 -0500, AMuzi wrote:

On 7/31/2018 12:48 PM, wrote:
On Friday, July 27, 2018 at 11:34:00 PM UTC-7, John B. Slocomb wrote:

A guy in the welding shop breathed too many zinc fumes and was all
curled up and groaning so we took him to the Emergency Clinic (USAF)
where we were trying to explain to the doctor on duty that "It isn't
an appendix, the guy's got galvanized poisoning".

Had the doctor's mate not come in and looked up zinc in the poison
handbook they would have started cutting.

They do not operate without X-rays.


They sure do for an inflamed appendix.

I have no idea what they do today but back in, probably, the late
60's, when you were carried into a medical station with severe stomach
pains on the lower right side they suspected the appendix and the
given the seriousness of a ruptured appendix vis-a-vis cutting a hole
in the stomach wall made the operation the safest of the options.

And you're probably right. But this is the 21st century and the lawyers standing in the lobby just in case they operated and there wasn't appendicitis. This is one of the problems in hospitals and part of why medical insurance is so damned expensive - any hospital treatment is way over-expensive because of these settlements. It has reached the point where hospitals almost always settle out of court because juries will return staggering settlements.

Juries return verdicts and not settlements. My firm defends the two largest hospital groups in the state. We try a lot of med-mal cases and win most. Hospitals settle when liability is clear. It's rare and dopey attorney who takes a weak med-mal case because doctors and hospitals will not settle and the case will get tried, at least in Oregon. One reason why doctors are tough defendants is because they have to report settlements to the National Practitioner Data Bank -- it's a ding against their record and it affects insurance premium. In many, but not all, professional liability insurance policies, the doctor has the right to decide whether to settle. Doctors and hospitals don't settle defensible claims.

-- Jay Beattie.

Do you want to think of that for a moment Jay? How does a civil suit approach this sort of thing?

I don't understand the question.

-- Jay Beattie.