Malpractice Books

Thirty years old NFL superstar quarterback Jim Wellman was severely injured in the Pro Bowl shattering his legs. Eight months later, he remains wheelchair bound and beginning therapy at the Shady Glen Rehabilitation Center in Napa Valley under the tutelage of physical therapist Marti Solis. He turns on the charm, but she hides her attraction by bullying him out of the chair, which she believes he remained in way too long. Dr. Francis Murdoch agrees with Marti's assessment.

As they work on his rehabilitation, they become friends that soon blossoms into love. However, he is shattered that he will never play football again due to the negligence of his medical caretakers at the Sunset Community Hospital, who he sues. While his attorney tells him to stay away from Marti as she is a key witness in his case, he cannot as the suit means nothing if he loses the woman who has sacked his heart, but given him a reason to live.

WALK LIKE A MAN is an intriguing character study with a romantic subplot that enhances the relationship between therapist and client. Jim is the interesting character as he feels he has nothing now that he no longer has football until the feisty Marti makes him want to walk as much for her as for him. Sue Swift provides a fine drama starring a fallen sports hero whose mental anguish may prove greater than his physical problems.

Harriet Klausner

I got this book because I am going to law school. This was one of the easiest ways to study the procedure for medical malpractice. This is a must for would-be law students and anyone thinking of filing a lawsuit for malpractice.

This simple but effective book provides another great tool for coaches and athletes. The simple line drawings effectively communicate the general positions and motions. The accompanying text is simple and straightforward. The only negative would be that this book has, apparently, not been updated in nearly a QUARTER CENTURY! (WHEW...sounds like a long time when you put it that way!) The basics are the same, but some thinking, particularly on free and breaststrokes, has changed.

This is a valuable book for anyone who is personally involved, or knows someone who is involved battling breast cancer. This woman was mis-diagnosed and fought thru the courtroom and chemo-room to save her life. I've talked with her and she takes Tamoxifin daily and has been living every moment for the past thirteen years!

This book is missing one key doctor and that is Dr. Harold Shipman of England but they do mention the notorious doctor. The book focuses on doctors who kill their spouses, children, lovers, and of course, the patients. There are variety of doctors written about in this book that do get my attention like the Italian American doctor who is found guilty of killing his wife and his mistress' husband. Of course, the mistress doesn't go away quietly and she testifies against him after he dumps her for another woman. This book is really an anthology of doctors who commit murders. One doctor kills both of his own sons for insurance money was the one that made me angry the most. One doctor gains a taste for murdering his patients in America and in Africa unbeknownst to the authorities over there that he was practicing medicine. It's an okay book with some pictures of the doctors who look more like criminals than doctors themselves. I believe almost all the doctors written about it in this book are male. If you are true crime reader like myself, you'll find this book interesting.

There are very few crime novels that deal with negligence. Most crime writers prefer instead to write about murder. The author's background in medicine and law fits this narrow genre to a tee.
Feegle wrote an excellent thriller and used lots of little known medical trivia to pull off a well written short read. I found only one drawback to Malpractice. The ending was too sensational and brought down the rest of the book.
On the whole Feegle's Malpractice is one of the best thrillers I have ever read.

Very good book. Covers how to document really well. And it actually goes into legal proceedings in the unfortunate event that you ever have to deal with it.

Gives very clear examples on how to document your charts.

For me as a European law professor this - admittedly somewhat outdated book - was very helpful in many respects: it showed me how thorough research on the tort process and its shortcomings is performed and it also convinced me that medical malpractice is quite different from say automobile accidents as far as the role of tort law is concerned. I think that this is a good book to read for anyone studying the tort process and evaluating the arguments for and against alternative patient insurance arrangements. I was a bit disappointed by the final chapter ('Ruminations for the future'), because the policy statements and suggestions for reform in that chapter are in my opinion not really firmly backed by the empirical evidence of the previous chapters.

I picked this book up as a birthday present not long after we had a bit of an incident in a local hospital, involving a 17cm pair of scissors being left inside some poor woman after surgery. Bet there's a scrub nurse going around saying "Scissors... Scissors..." somewhere!

Youngson and Schott have put together a very interesting and, let's face it, pretty damning picture of the medical profession, in ancient, mediaeval and recent times. It starts with a review of the high-technology wizardry that has been flogged off over the years, and moves through a variety of strange and often sickening stories. Some of these stories - like the concept of 'Blue Light Healing" - are just plain weird and quite funny, whilst others - like the stories of lobotomy and the thalidomide tragedy - are quite depressing.

I'm a medical student. Whilst reading this didn't exactly put me off my course, it certainly gives pause for thought. Not a light read, but very, very interesting.

A good book on a contentious topic. Written by an experienced health care economist and an attorney, the authors attempt to provide a broad perspective on medical malpractice. Sloan and Chepke agree that there are serious problems with medical malpractice, but not the problems generally discussed in most public forums. The intermittant public attention paid to this issue is driven often by intermittant malpractice 'crises' in which insurers withdraw from markets, premiums escalate sharply, and there is fear of consequent physician withdrawal from states with sharply rising premiums. A common popular perception of these crises is that they are driven by excessive tort litigation and awards. In fact, there is little evidence for this explanation and recurrent malpractice insurance crises apparently have their roots in other phenomena, notably cyclical features of the insurance industry. Another common public point of discussion is that malpractice litigation is a significant contributor to rising health care costs. The available evidence, however, suggests that malpractice torts have at best a modest effect on health care costs.
Where Sloan and Chepke see major problems with malpractice torts is their apparent failure to have an impact on the high rate of serious medical errors in the USA. In addition, the data cited by Sloan and Chepke indicates that the tort system does a poor and inefficient job of compensating individuals injured through negligence. Sloan and Chepke discuss the first generation of tort reforms which are mainly caps on awards. The major effects of these reforms has been indeed to reduce awards, claims, and insurance premiums with the primary beneficiaries being physicians and insurers. It appears that first generation reforms are a stereotypical example of successful interest group lobbying of state legislatures with modest general public benefits.
Much of the book is a systematic discussion of proposed reforms including such topics as alternative dispute resolution, specialized health courts, no-fault procedures, and a number of others. These discussions are generally thorough, contain nice summaries of the usually limited evidence, and discouraging in the sense that Sloan and Chepke demonstrate the uncertainties that any proposed reforms will work and point out the pragmatic political obstacles to most of these proposed reforms.
Sloan and Chepke conclude with a chapter proposing a series of modest reforms, particularly focused on making hospitals or hospital systems the focus on malpractice litigation in the hope that this will produce incentives to improve patient safety. This is reasonable and approaches like the one proposed are used by some academic hospital systems where physicians are employees.
Sloan and Chepke may make a couple of errors. As they point out, the tort system does a poor job of identifying and compensating meritorious claims. At the same time, a lot of claims pursued do lack merit. But this irrational element is one of the things that physicians most dislike about the present system. While the tort system may not be the 'lottery' claimed by many critics, its irrational enough to be worrisome to health care providers. There is also some recent evidence that some forms of torts do reduce medical errors. Nonetheless, Sloan and Chepke's analysis is convincing and their modest suggestions for reform quite reasonable.