DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog

A subway station might seem an unusual place to try to educate the public about protecting the rights of injured patients -- but maybe not so much when that station is the nearest to the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., and is traveled by thousands of staffers who work on Capitol Hill.

"Tell Congress to put patients first," the ads say. "There are 98,000 reasons why you should. 98000reasons.org."

The number refers to an oft-quoted report from the National Academies issued ten years ago that estimated that 98,000 patients died unnecessarily each year from medical errors.

Since then, as this blog has reported, the estimates of preventable deaths have climbed, despite a spate of efforts to make medical care safer.

The new ads are sponsored by the American Association for Justice, the lawyers' group that includes attorneys like me who represent patients in malpractice lawsuits. The ads are discussed in an article by Elizabeth Olson in the New York Times.

Several thought-provoking letters appear in the New York Times responding to the recent piece about the cancer treatment industry's advertisements. One letter was from Dr. James Rickert, of Bloomington, Ind., president of the Society for Patient Centered Orthopedics:

To the Editor:

As a cancer survivor who has faced recurrent bouts of disease, I agree that the intense marketing campaigns used by cancer centers only heighten the stress and anxiety of the difficult treatment decisions that all cancer patients face. It becomes nearly impossible, at a time when one feels that any poor decision could be fatal, to wade through all the non-science-based claims for success.

As a physician who treats many patients with terminal metastatic disease, I have seen that this marketing often leads to heart-wrenching guilt and second-guessing by patient and family alike when treatments fail. Rather than being allowed to accept that their disease was incurable despite the best medical care, patients often feel that they are somehow to blame for choosing the wrong institution in which to receive treatment.

This is a distressing example by our nation’s finest medical centers of the shameful practice of placing financial concerns before the needs of the patients that they claim to serve.

If our academic medical centers cannot offer better patient-centered, evidence-based care than this, where in the world shall the medical community look for leadership?

Dr. Rickert makes an even better case than I could about the dangers of relying on advertising to make important decisions.