An Overlooked and Devastating Form of Medical Injury

Some doctors hurt patients by exaggerating the severity of Patients’ conditions, prompting patients to abstain from opportunities and limit their lives

By

David Gottfried

The insurance industry, and the mainstream press, which in this digitalized, video-recorded world largely consists of empty-headed numbskulls who spend college majoring in looking good for the cameras, has soiled America’s consciousness with abject lies about doctors and lawsuits:

Most American airheads believe that every other personal injury plaintiff is a scheming grafter who just got half a million dollars because she suffered hot coffee, splashing on her arm, in Mc Donalds. For every practically make-believe story portraying Plaintiffs as fat slobs making a mint for minimal misery, I can show you dozens of Plaintiffs who got screwed. The reasons are manifold.

Suffice it to say just rewards are hard to come by, and the law is often a minefield of quirks and oddities cleverly crafted to fuck those not well-connected (For example, the statute of limitations for medical malpractice in New York is 2 and one half years, but the wrongful death statute of limitations is 2 years and is hidden away, in the New York Code, thousands of pages away from other statutes of limitations), medical staff will stick up for other medical staff, expert witnesses are sometimes hard to come by, and very often, while the malpractice was committed, the patient was unconscious and under the knife in the OR. Of course, the patient can obtain the operative report, but they are often sanitized, dull tracts which cite the obvious in the greatest detail and skip over, or lie about, the critical issues.

(Once, after I submitted a request for a patient’s hospital records, I got, among other things, two hundred pages about the patient and “racial sensitivity,” and the case had nothing to do with race. And I had to pay for these pages. Much of what passes for liberal progress is illiberal gobbledygook and a waste of time.)

Today I want to direct your attention to a harm committed by doctors which, to my knowledge, has never been litigated:

Toward a Brand-New Tort Against Doctors:

Misrepresentation of Severity of Illness to Induce Patient Acceptance of Outcome (This Tort deserves a better name)

Medical Malpractice cases are a variety of Tort cases. Torts, basically, are wrongs, and resulting injuries, that transpire outside of the realm of contract law or property law. Almost all slip and fall cases, car accidents, traffic accidents, broken bones as a consequence of a fist fight or any other fight, slander, libel and medical malpractice cases are a species of tort.

Every tort can be divided into one of two classes:

Unintentional tort: The tortfeasor (the one guilty of a tort) harbored no malice and created an injury simply because he was an awkward klutz or a sloppy schlemiel.

Intentional Torts: The tortfeasor wanted to create harm. He socked you in the jaw (battery); he is Alex Jones, and he said that you made up stories about your children getting killed in a mass shooting (defamation); he wouldn’t let you leave his apartment for two hours (false imprisonment).

Medical malpractice is classified as an unintentional tort. The doctor did not deliberately hurt the patient. He simply erred.

My new tort falls outside of the realm of medical malpractice. However, I think this sort of conduct on the part of doctors is cruelly pernicious and can pulverize a patient’s life.

In the new tort I propose, the doctor, to induce the plaintiff to be content with whatever outcome results, exaggerates and inflates the severity of the illness. The doctor does this so the patient will accept his fate, no matter how grim it will be. The doctor should know that the patient, believing that he is sicker than he is, will shy away from life, will retire from commercial competition and surrender his right to fall in love because he does not want to be a burden to a mate.

I have known patients who have ditched professional careers because a doctor exaggerated their maladies. The patients reasoned like this: Since I’ll probably die in 5 to 10 years, doesn’t it make sense to just get government assistance and slowly disintegrate under the drumbeat of nauseating soap operas.

After a doctor creates a future inspired by Dante’s Inferno, the patient will reason: Since I’ll probably be a handicapped eyesore with grotesque braces and equipment appended to my body (The first rule of medical aesthetics: Make everything look as ugly as possible so the patient will have no confidence. We want our patients to be bereft of confidence. That makes them silly putty when we finagle them to put them in the smelliest room in the rehab center and hike their bill), I better forget about love and a real relationship. Better to have disconnected, drug addicted flings on the pavement.

Don’t tell me that a doctor, who generally has an IQ much higher than that of the general population, is too stupid to realize that their excessively pessimistic prognostications will induce the patient to withdraw. The patient plans a withered life and plods along, lonely and broken, until death offers him release. Doctors should pay for this.

I believe that this tort is very widespread because I have met scads of people who tell me that they or their loved ones survived a disease that was 99 percent fatal. Something seems very much out of the ordinary when 60 percent of people tell me that 99 percent of other patients with their condition croaked. Of course, this doesn’t prove that doctors deliberately exaggerate a patient’s illness, but why else would doctors offer such a forbidding forecast.

For G-d’s sake, good news is apt to lift a patient’s spirits and propel him toward recovery. A doctor’s grim prognosis, by contrast, may make the patient decline all nourishment and seek to expedite the end. Since a grim prognosis is generally hateful to a sick patient, one of the few reasons for offering the patient a miserable forecast is to induce the patient to accept whatever results.

This tort isn’t really medical malpractice as it is an intentional tort. It is closer to fraud as this tort is based on a lie. Consequently, medical insurance will not defend the doctor. Hence, this is the sort of lawsuit that can really make a board-certified bully cry uncle.

Finally, I should note that the tort discussed here is certainly not my primary gripe with medicine. I have discussed much bigger problems in Medicine in “Nine Problems in Health Care that Neither Democrats nor Republicans Ever Address,” my substack piece of January 24, 2021 ¹

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