Word: doctorings
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Valdez doesn't have it quite so bad--but don't try to tell her that. While she is busy looking for a new doctor in Sierra Vista for the big day in August, she is still commuting two hours to keep appointments with her current doctor in Tucson. The road to Sierra Vista winds through mountains and creosote flats. "It's going to be summer now, and it's getting hotter here," she says. "I'm afraid of the car breaking down again"--as it did recently while Valdez was driving alone on her way home from Tucson...
...McDonough went into the hospital in 1997 to have a calcified growth, which the doctor said could be cancerous, removed from his neck. Two days later he awoke to find himself paralyzed from the chest down. Still in the intensive-care unit, he felt strangled by a noose of pain and needed three excruciating gasps of air to cry for help. "I was crushed," says McDonough, 69, a former weapons-plant inspector from Littleton, Colo. He once loved to fish and dreamed of restoring his ideal car: a 1965 Chrysler. But he soon realized that he could do neither...
...fight. In February he wheeled himself into a state legislative hearing on damage caps. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled that "physical impairment and disfigurement" are exempt from limits on jury awards, but this spring the state's lawmakers limited the effect of the court's decision. "The doctor who performed this unnecessary operation has left the state and is continuing with his life elsewhere," McDonough testified. That neurosurgeon, Richard Branan, 59, declined to comment about McDonough. Branan practices in Los Angeles and faces two other trials this year in Colorado. His attorney in one case, in which the patient died...
...licenses in California and Wisconsin, he could still be practicing. Instead, he is fighting off the remainder of 28 lawsuits filed against him between 1998 and 2000. Although McEnany declined requests for interviews, one of his attorneys, Steven Sager of Fond du Lac, Wis., says, "I think that the doctor provided good care." He noted that several cases have been dismissed and McEnany has so far made no payments in Wisconsin...
...critics of doctor discipline, the McEnany case represents an extreme example of a familiar problem. While the vast majority of doctors perform with care and lose few, if any, legal judgments or settlements, a small number of negligent or incompetent doctors endanger patients and drive up malpractice-insurance costs for everyone. Since 1990, one-third of malpractice awards and settlements have resulted from just 5% of doctors making such payouts, according to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB). Yet doctors and hospitals too often fail to discipline repeat offenders...