I agree with everything above.
I'd like to add a few words from the book Better, written by Atul Gawande, who's a general surgeon at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and an associate professor at both the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. Although he's not a veterinarian, the topic transcends both fields.
"The paradox at the heart of medical care is that it works so well, and yet never well enough. It routinely gives people years of health that they otherwise wouldn't have had. Death rates from heart disease have plummeted by almost two-thirds since the 1950's. Risk of death from stroke have fallen more than 80%. The cancer survival rate is now 70%. But these advances have required drugs and machines and operations and, most of all, decisions that can as easily damage people as save them. It's precisely because of our enormous success that people are bound to wonder what went wrong when we fail.
As a surgeon, I will perform about 350 operations in the next year, everything from emergency repair of strangulated groin hernias to removal of thyroid cancers. For six, maybe 8 patients (roughly 2%) things will not go well. They will develop life-threatening bleeding. Or I will damage a critical nerve. Or I will make a wrong diagnoses. Whatever Hippocrates may have said, sometimes we do harm. Studies of serious complications find that usually half are unavoidable, and in such cases I might be able to find solace in knowing this. But in the other half I will have done something wrong, and my mistakes are going to change someone's life forever. Society is still searching for an adequate way to understand these instances. Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are. But we are tainted by the harm we cause.
I watch alot of baseball, and I often find myself thinking about the third baseman's job. In a season, a third baseman will have about as many chances to throw a man out as I will to operate on people. The very best (players like Mike Lowell, Bill Mueller, and Alex Rodriguez) do this perfectly almost every time. But 2% of the time even they drop the ball or throw it over the 1st baseman's head. No one playing a full season fails to make stupid errors. When a player does, the fans hoot and jeer. If his error costs the game, the hooting will turn to yelling. Imagine, though, if every time Mike Lowell threw and missed, the error cost or damaged the life of someone you cared about. One error leaves an old man with a tracheotomy; another puts a young woman in a wheelchair; another leaves a child brain-damaged the rest of her days. His team mates would still commiserate, but the rest of us? Some would rush the field howling for Lowell's blood. Others would see all the saves he'd made and forgive him for his failures. Nobody though would see him in quite the same light again. And nobody would be happy to have the game go on as if nothing had happened. We'd want him to show sorrow, to take responsibility. We'd want the people he injured to be helped in a meaningful way."
It goes on to take about how malpractice cases rarely benefit the injured and how lawyers manipulate the system and so forth...
