06-15-2012, 02:14 AM
AllGold wrote:
Good point, Wig. But still, no one--even a cardiologist--would expect a 31-year-old (who happens to be employed as a police officer and expected to maintain a good level of fitness) to be likely to drop dead of a heart attack.
Let's see -- he's got a predisposing factor in the high blood pressure, and he has multiple symptoms that all point towards cardiovascular disease, and he goes to a heart specialist (probably referred by his regular doctor) and the doctor fails to warn him about risk or send him to the angiography lab right then and there, where they would have diagnosed his problem and either implanted stents or sent him to surgery.
Instead, the patient gets sent off and probably feels relieved that none of the above happened.
Maybe he's celebrating his good fortune (which really isn't) or maybe he's just a rake, but he's not supposed to die of a preventable cause after going to a specialist over that very thing.
That's what makes it malpractice -- the failure to provide medical care at the level known as the standard of care in the community.
It also sounds like the jury took care to parse the various sets of blame, which suggests that they are not stupid, but perhaps a little conservative and trying to do justice as best they can.
I think it's unfortunate that there is a deep seated antipathy towards trial by jury in this country for those cases which can be trivialized in this manner. The man didn't die of three way sex, he died (apparently) of a heart attack. The question before the jury wasn't whether they approve or disapprove of three way sex, but whether the actions by the doctor were below the standard of care for a licensed physician in that community.
By the way, it used to be not uncommon for 20 year olds to die of heart problems on the practice field or in the military. The Army Medical Corps saw quite a bit of this when the draft was ramped up at the beginning of WWII. In this case, it sounds like early atherosclerosis, not an impossibility at all, and something that a cardiologist is trained to look for.
):pimp::boink:
