When a physician is sued, regardless of whether or not the allegations have merit, it is a personal assault on his or her honor.
Except, of course, that is not the way courts or lawyers view it. To quote from
People v. Saavedra-Rodriguez, 971 P.2d 223 (Colo. 1999) from the Colorado Supreme Court:
“simple negligent medical treatment, although hopefully unusual, is sufficiently ordinary that we consider it foreseeable. Negligence, unfortunately, is entirely too frequent a human conduct to be considered ‘abnormal.’” (As mentioned from a recent identical case from the WV Supreme Court
http://www.courtswv.gov/supreme-court/docs/spring2016/14-0890.pdf) (In case you were wondering, I have a relative who was distantly related to the victim, so I read the WV opinion.)
The case they considered was if a murderer could argue that his victim died of malpractice rather than the acts of the murderer. The court, along with virtually every other, held that malpractice is to be expected if you have to see a physician or visit a hospital. Or to put it more bluntly, if you injure another person such that they have to go to the hospital, you have to assume that they will likely die from medical negligence. In the same way, in every criminal case, the defendant argues on appeal that their original lawyer was completely incompetent and their conviction should therefore be reversed based on "ineffective assistance of counsel." Or judges, who when they are reversed on appeal, have the superior court tell them that they are completely incompetent and should be removed from the bench.
Why are you concerned if someone who has absolutely no knowledge of medicine, or a jury that, in the words of one movie consists of people "so dumb they couldn't figure a way out of jury duty" thinks you did something wrong? Lawyers don't pay attention to what courts or other lawyers say about them, so why should we? I certainly don't.
As to employment, I have been on the credentials committee, and have been part of the group looking for physicians to recruit for close to two decades. During that time, I cannot recall anyone
everpaying attention to the list of malpractice cases (if there was one.) If there are problems, there are many other indications of it in their application: switching jobs every 3 months (without being a locums), state board actions, horrible (or no) references, etc., etc.
In my mind a lawsuit is the ultimate bad evaluation a patient can give. Having too many of them cannot be a good sign.
There might be a tiny nugget of truth in that for primary care physicians, or specialists that a patient sees regularly. However, how often can a patient remember the anesthesiologist who was their physician, or the radiologist or the pathologist? If it is a bad evaluation, it would almost always be of the surgeon or whoever did the procedure. How often can patients separate out what bad result is the result of the anesthesiologist?
