The purpose of this technical report is to provide pediatricians with an understanding of past crises within the professional liability insurance industry, the difficulties of the tort system, and alternative strategies for resolving malpractice disputes that have been applied to medical malpractice actions. Through this report, pediatricians will gain a technical understanding of common altern...

Fear of being involved in a malpractice lawsuit has spawned various defensive attitudes and behaviors in physicians. Despite the relative low rate of malpractice suits against psychiatrists, they too engage in defensive medicine. Simon's and Shuman's paper reviews the hidden danger to clinical care that defensive psychiatric practices can pose to both patients and doctors. This commentary furth...

This is the third in a series of 5 articles providing a contemporary overview and introduction to unconventional dentistry (UD) and its correlation to unconventional medicine (UM). UD presents issues of dental quackery, fraud and malpractice, and it also engenders professional concerns about public protection and professional risks. Case reports illustrate numerous issues. The reader is encoura...

Many observers of the malpractice insurance market disagree on the cause of the problem or the appropriate solution to increasing malpractice premiums. Some argue that increased frequency and soaring rewards are to blame, while others attribute rising premiums to insurance company’s losses on investments during the economic downturn. A number of laws have been introduced that attempt to stabili...

The medical malpractice system in the United States is designed to both compensate and to deter medically induced injury. It performs these functions through the civil justice system, which allows individuals to seek redress for injury caused by medical negligence (improper or substandard medical care), and the liability insurance industry, which charges premiums to providers in exchange for fi...

The discipline of pastoral counseling has developed to the point at which malpractice claims against pastoral counselors are a reality. The need for forensic psychiatrists to participate in such suits is likely to increase. In this article, we review the recent California case of Nally v. Grace Community Church. Kenneth Nally committed suicide while under the care of clergy. His parents claimed...

Despite widespread reports of defensive medicine in surveys of physicians, empirical investigations have produced conflicting evidence. This paper models the interactions in a health insurance market, predicting that rises in medical malpractice pressure have non-monotonic effects on health care spending. Spending rises with malpractice pressure until reaching a threshold, and decreases thereaf...

OBJECTIVE To examine the causes of retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) malpractice claims filed with the Ophthalmic Mutual Insurance Company. METHODS All closed ROP malpractice claims were reviewed. RESULTS Eight cases involved failure of transfer of care on patient discharge from the hospital, 3 cases demonstrated inappropriately long periods between follow-up examinations, 1 case was due to ...

Medical negligence suits have become an issue of concern for doctors as well as for the health service departments. The main objectives of medical malpractice law are to compensate patients who are injured by negligence and to improve the quality of medical care. The amount of money and time spent on these cases may not be an effective allocation of social resources to minimize patient safety. ...