Scared Doctor, problem?

ScaredMedfed

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Okay I am in high school right now. I am planning on becoming a doctor. One thing that I am scared of is that when I become a doctor I might prescribe or do something to one of my patients that might kill him or do him extreme damage and I might end up in jail or something like that.

Now of course I am feeling this because I have barely any knowledge in medicine right now and when I do beame a doctor, I'll know better so I just want to know, am I just paranoid? Do other people think like I do?
Plese respond! This is the only thing holding me back from choosing medicine

Also where does this post go, I wasn't sure

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You're in high school and are planning on becoming an incompetent physician? Kids these days have such low expectations...
 
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Dude, you're a decade removed from your earliest opportunity to prescribe a medication without supervision. I've never heard of a doctor put into jail for a medical error (though they have been sued).

Stop worrying.
 
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I think it's way way way too early to worry about that. For now, focus on figuring out what you want to do with your life. You are still in high school, and once you get into college you'll learn more about what you like. If you do want to become a doctor, know that being premed is a pretty huge commitment. As soon as you get into college, get started as soon as you can with keeping up your grades and start volunteering in your local hospital or clinical setting. Eventually worry about MCATs and all that good stuff.

As for the "getting in trouble" thing, while insurance and liability is a huge deal in medicine, it's not something you need to worry about. In fact, most med students don't worry about it. The goal of medical school is to teach you how to be as efficient as possible, so you'll learn about how to prevent mistakes. Additionally, remember that health care is a system, so it's not just you but also medical techs, nurses, PAs, secretaries, etc. While this may increase the chance for error, this may also prevent mistakes as well by adding multiple "layers" in the decision making process. In my job I see nurses and secretaries correcting doctors all the time.

Everyone makes mistakes, doctors included.

Now go to your pep rally or study for your SAT or something..
 
Some of the best advice a physician has ever given me, as it may relate to the OP's concern: "You do not have to know everything at once."

Your fear about this now stems entirely from your lack of training. You will have years of experience and training in prescribing the correct medications before anyone actually lets you do this.
 
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You'll hear @Goro reference imposter syndrome regarding students who are successful in the application process. You'll hear of second year syndrome when med students are positive they're suffering from some life-threatening illness just because they read about it. You'll see med school graduates experiencing panic attacks because they won't have as much of a safety net the minute they start residency. A residency program director once told me she went to the bathroom, threw up, and then walked back out as if nothing had happened on her first official day as an attending. (Judging by her overall demeanor, you'd never guess this happened in a million years.)

A healthy amount of fear's a good thing in these parts. If it's crippling, get it managed.
 
Thank you everyone for the answer, I guess it's just my lack of medical knowledge and experience.

Kid, just get into college first.

Yenno, if you don't have anything to say you don't always have to try and fit in, man.
 
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Some of the best advice a physician has ever given me, as it may relate to the OP's concern: "You do not have to know everything at once."

Your fear about this now stems entirely from your lack of training. You will have years of experience and training in prescribing the correct medications before anyone actually lets you do this.
Thanks a lot. You had the answer I was looking for. I hope med schools treating u well. Good Luck!
 
Okay I am in high school right now. I am planning on becoming a doctor. One thing that I am scared of is that when I become a doctor I might prescribe or do something to one of my patients that might kill him or do him extreme damage and I might end up in jail or something like that.

Now of course I am feeling this because I have barely any knowledge in medicine right now and when I do beame a doctor, I'll know better so I just want to know, am I just paranoid? Do other people think like I do?
Plese respond! This is the only thing holding me back from choosing medicine

Also where does this post go, I wasn't sure
Here is the deal... Doctors aren't perfect and mistakes. One example; Put my patient on 10cc's amiodorone drip per hour what if you accidently said 100. (just an example, relax physicians I don't know the dosage) haha. Doctors make mistakes and are human too. That would result in cardiac arrest because it's used to treat abnormal heart arrythmias'. It happens, and you might be called 007 for awhile. *license to kill* lol. Don't worry about that now.

I also agree with the other poster. Assuming you take medical teminology for one year in college... You will have 1 year + 4 years of medical school + 2-4 years of residency = 7-9 years of training. Don't worry about it.
 
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Amiodarone is 150mg x1 over ten minutes, followed by 1mg/min for 6 hours, followed by 0.5mg/min for 18 hours. That completes the IV load for patients with ventricular tachycardias (on label) or supraventricular rhythm disturbances with abberancy. If they're truly unstable, i.e. peri-coding, then it's 300mg all at once.

And the pharmacy wouldn't approve the order if it was wrong, and the ICU nurse wouldn't honor the wrong dose because she/he knows what the dose is supposed to be, and the pump wouldn't accept the wrong administration rate because it has an internal database that contains most commonly used medications. All of these things ensure that my junior residents rotating through the ICU are guided towards the right decisions for the patient.
 
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Amiodarone is 150mg x1 over ten minutes, followed by 1mg/min for 6 hours, followed by 0.5mg/min for 18 hours. That completes the IV load for patients with ventricular tachycardias (on label) or supraventricular rhythm disturbances with abberancy. If they're truly unstable, i.e. peri-coding, then it's 300mg all at once.

And the pharmacy wouldn't approve the order if it was wrong, and the ICU nurse wouldn't honor the wrong dose because she/he knows what the dose is supposed to be, and the pump wouldn't accept the wrong administration rate because it has an internal database that contains most commonly used medications. All of these things ensure that my junior residents rotating through the ICU are guided towards the right decisions for the patient.
I was very unaware of this, thank you for pointing this out to me. Of course, I'm not a doctor or a college student at this time. That's awesome because I like to learn, thank you for teaching me on that. :)
 
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I was very unaware of this, thank you for pointing this out to me. Of course, I'm not a doctor or a college student at this time. That's awesome because I like to learn, thank you for teaching me on that. :)

I wasn't trying to show off, it was more as an example of how many checks there are in the system. You don't doctor alone. Unless you do wilderness medicine, I suppose. And in that case you probably aren't hanging much amio.
 
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I wasn't trying to show off, it was more as an example of how many checks there are in the system. You don't doctor alone. Unless you do wilderness medicine, I suppose. And in that case you probably aren't hanging much amio.
Very cool. Thank you for sharing. I know you wern't trying to show off based on you presented it. :) Thank you!
 
Dude, you're a decade removed from your earliest opportunity to prescribe a medication without supervision. I've never heard of a doctor put into jail for a medical error (though they have been sued).

Well...that pain clinic couple facing 30 years. And I'm sure there's other cases like that, albeit extremely rare. But that I believe was an issue of them letting their midlevels peddle pre-signed scripts with little regard for the actual symptomology or the potential for addiction. A lot of their patients ended up ODing I believe, or something like that. But still....30 years?

one of many sources for the case: http://www.tbo.com/news/breaking-ne...un-amok-they-get-30-years-in-prison-20140919/

Funny thing is I'm sure we all know of places like this. Apparently it was the scale of it that pissed off prosecutors.

Yenno, if you don't have anything to say you don't always have to try and fit in, man.

Usually when Goro says something regarding medical admissions, it's right or pretty close to being correct. Albeit sometimes he has opinions that may not apply to every single adcom, but this is solid advice imo (if you're not planning on a BS/MD). You are going to know sooooo much more about this process as you research it further, which will likely happen during your college years.

Overall I think your concerns are totally merited and show a level of awareness often lost on many HSers planning on going into this profession. It is a concern, but the basic idea is this: If you simply just spend the time to learn what you need to learn and take your training seriously, this may only happen at best once in a blue moon (think once a decade, if even that often). But when it does happen, much more likely than not, the affair will be a PITA but it will be manageable. That's the take home point. Much much much much more often than not, cases are simply dismissed or settled for a reasonable amount.
 
Okay I am in high school right now. I am planning on becoming a doctor. One thing that I am scared of is that when I become a doctor I might prescribe or do something to one of my patients that might kill him or do him extreme damage and I might end up in jail or something like that.

Now of course I am feeling this because I have barely any knowledge in medicine right now and when I do beame a doctor, I'll know better so I just want to know, am I just paranoid? Do other people think like I do?
Plese respond! This is the only thing holding me back from choosing medicine

Also where does this post go, I wasn't sure
I recommend reading "Better" by Dr Atul Gawande. He goes into detail about what physicians owe patients in cases of negligence, oversight etc and how doctors deal with malpractice and general jurisprudence. Plus, you get to read about physicians who have a hand in lethal injection! Good luck buddy!
 
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Here is the deal... Doctors aren't perfect and mistakes. One example; Put my patient on 10cc's amiodorone drip per hour what if you accidently said 100. (just an example, relax physicians I don't know the dosage) haha. Doctors make mistakes and are human too. That would result in cardiac arrest because it's used to treat abnormal heart arrythmias'. It happens, and you might be called 007 for awhile. *license to kill* lol. Don't worry about that now.

I also agree with the other poster. Assuming you take medical teminology for one year in college... You will have 1 year + 4 years of medical school + 2-4 years of residency = 7-9 years of training. Don't worry about it.
This may be a little late but thanks a lot. I get these problems are being caused by my lack of knowledge now, I am in HS after all. Thanks again
 
I recommend reading "Better" by Dr Atul Gawande. He goes into detail about what physicians owe patients in cases of negligence, oversight etc and how doctors deal with malpractice and general jurisprudence. Plus, you get to read about physicians who have a hand in lethal injection! Good luck buddy!
THANK YOU!!
 
Well...that pain clinic couple facing 30 years. And I'm sure there's other cases like that, albeit extremely rare. But that I believe was an issue of them letting their midlevels peddle pre-signed scripts with little regard for the actual symptomology or the potential for addiction. A lot of their patients ended up ODing I believe, or something like that. But still....30 years?

one of many sources for the case: http://www.tbo.com/news/breaking-ne...un-amok-they-get-30-years-in-prison-20140919/

Funny thing is I'm sure we all know of places like this. Apparently it was the scale of it that pissed off prosecutors.



Usually when Goro says something regarding medical admissions, it's right or pretty close to being correct. Albeit sometimes he has opinions that may not apply to every single adcom, but this is solid advice imo (if you're not planning on a BS/MD). You are going to know sooooo much more about this process as you research it further, which will likely happen during your college years.

Overall I think your concerns are totally merited and show a level of awareness often lost on many HSers planning on going into this profession. It is a concern, but the basic idea is this: If you simply just spend the time to learn what you need to learn and take your training seriously, this may only happen at best once in a blue moon (think once a decade, if even that often). But when it does happen, much more likely than not, the affair will be a PITA but it will be manageable. That's the take home point. Much much much much more often than not, cases are simply dismissed or settled for a reasonable amount.
Thank you that was a very detailed response. I am not worried anymore. I'll learn enough not to make mistakes over the years :)
 
Everyone makes mistakes, and for physicians, yes, sometimes they are lethal. No sugar coating it-- as a doctor you undoubtedly will at some point make somebody worse off, maybe seriously harm or kill them. I think there was even a Scrubs episode about it.

While there are safeguards in place for some things, like dosages, most things you'll do won't be as well monitored. If you think about it, you'll see many thousands of patients over your career. If you make an error just a fraction of a percent of the time, that will be still be a fairly large number of people you might harm.

So OP is actually right to be scared. While I agree that it's silly to worry about your knowledge base while still in high school, this is a field of lifelong learning, and you'll still be learning from your mistakes even as an attending. Plan to worry about your knowledge base forever.
 
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Okay I am in high school right now. I am planning on becoming a doctor. One thing that I am scared of is that when I become a doctor I might prescribe or do something to one of my patients that might kill him or do him extreme damage and I might end up in jail or something like that.

Now of course I am feeling this because I have barely any knowledge in medicine right now and when I do beame a doctor, I'll know better so I just want to know, am I just paranoid? Do other people think like I do?
Plese respond! This is the only thing holding me back from choosing medicine

Also where does this post go, I wasn't sure

Jail? You would be lucky to go to jail. They usually give you the electric chair for that.
 
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Jail? You would be lucky to go to jail. They usually give you the electric chair for that.

Can't tell if trolling.

A lot of treatments can have seriously harmful/lethal side effects or the risks in general may be harm/death. But depending on attribution of blame (a tricky thing in and of itself), a doc may or may not be liable. If a doc gets convicted on mal that resulted in death, capital punishment or even significant amounts of prison time is not generally the go-to choice. It's usually a large cash settlement.
 
Can't tell if trolling.

A lot of treatments can have seriously harmful/lethal side effects or the risks in general may be harm/death. But depending on attribution of blame (a tricky thing in and of itself), a doc may or may not be liable. If a doc gets convicted on mal that resulted in death, capital punishment or even significant amounts of prison time is not generally the go-to choice. It's usually a large cash settlement.
You won't go to jail for errors/negligence. That's not really even at issue. Your mistakes will be malpractice issues, not criminal ones (unless you try to rip off insurance companies/Medicare).

But you'll harm someone at some point not for something as "innocuous" as a side effect ( which isn't really an error, it's a known "risk"). You will actually make a mistake. Everybody does. Your job is to minimize those, through additional learning/ knowledge, taking the time necessary, reading more, taking care of yourself, staying off substances/Etoh, knowing when to ask for help, and managing to quit before dementia kicks in. And even if you do all this, there will be a few times out of a few hundred patients, where you will make an error. It happens. It's why most doctors get named in a lawsuit at least once in their careers. You can't avoid ever making mistakes, you can only minimize them.
 
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You won't go to jail for errors/negligence. That's not really even at issue. Your mistakes will be malpractice issues, not criminal ones (unless you try to rip off insurance companies/Medicare).

But you'll harm someone at some point not for something as "innocuous" as a side effect ( which isn't really an error, it's a known "risk"). You will actually make a mistake. Everybody does. Your job is to minimize those, through additional learning/ knowledge, taking the time necessary, reading more, taking care of yourself, staying off substances/Etoh, knowing when to ask for help, and managing to quit before dementia kicks in. And even if you do all this, there will be a few times out of a few hundred patients, where you will make an error. It happens. It's why most doctors get named in a lawsuit at least once in their careers. You can't avoid ever making mistakes, you can only minimize them.

Idk man. When it comes to the "justice" system (as I'm sure you well know), **** just doesn't make sense sometimes.

Example below. And yeah yeah N=1, but we all know N does not really equal 1. It's rare, but these things happen, and it will f*** your life sideways for no good reason.

Nursing home doc didn't admit patient to hospital, even though he supposedly should have (according to the state -- and it's certainly possible the state is just wrong and perpetuating their own agenda to convict this guy). http://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/17/nyregion/in-rare-case-doctor-faces-jail-time-for-negligence.html
Result: Yayyyy >100 days in Rikers over the course of a year. Hope I don't get stabbed/raped/both, and I really hope my ****ing tuberculosis that I contracted from patients I was helping (jesus, come on man) doesn't act up while I'm in there.

Dr. Einaugler, the doctor on call at the nursing home when the 78-year-old woman was admitted, mistook a kidney dialysis catheter implanted in her abdomen for a feeding tube and ordered nurses to pump nutritional solution through it.

He was not prosecuted for confusing the tube: Everyone, including Dr. Einaugler, agreed that it was a horrific but unintentional mistake. Prosecutors argued that his actions turned criminal after he discovered the potentially lethal mixup and failed to heed instructions from the woman's kidney specialist to hospitalize her immediately.

Dr. Einaugler said that the specialist, Dr. Irving Dunn, chief of the nephrology unit at Interfaith, never told him that it was urgent to hospitalize Ms. Lamour as a precaution against peritonitis, an infection of the membrane lining the abdomen, and that he examined her twice that day and found her stable. He said that at the first hint that Ms. Lamour was in distress, when a nurse called him late Sunday afternoon, he ordered her admitted to the emergency room.

For its part, the state Medical Society decided to support Dr. Einaugler after it convened a panel of 57 doctors to examine the case. ''It makes every doctor vulnerable when your exercise of judgment can lead to criminal prosecution,'' Dr. Morton Kurtz, a past president of the society, said. ''We do not guard our own when it comes to egregious behavior. But this is the most unfounded case we have ever seen.''

@Law2Doc you ever not admitted someone a specialist never told you to despite there being a small thought in your mind to the contrary?

Guess you're potentially a horrible, bloodthirsty criminal then. You totally belong in (lol can't get over this) Riker's ****ing island.

It's so damn sad it's funny. I'm half laughing, half crying, but nevertheless this is what I've come to expect from these totally uneducated, misinformed, psychopathic prosecutors.
 
Idk man. When it comes to the "justice" system (as I'm sure you well know), **** just doesn't make sense sometimes.

Example below. And yeah yeah N=1, but we all know N does not really equal 1. It's rare, but these things happen, and it will f*** your life sideways for no good reason.

Nursing home doc didn't admit patient to hospital, even though he supposedly should have (according to the state -- and it's certainly possible the state is just wrong and perpetuating their own agenda to convict this guy). http://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/17/nyregion/in-rare-case-doctor-faces-jail-time-for-negligence.html
Result: Yayyyy >100 days in Rikers over the course of a year. Hope I don't get stabbed/raped/both, and I really hope my ****ing tuberculosis that I contracted from patients I was helping (jesus, come on man) doesn't act up while I'm in there.


@Law2Doc you ever not admitted someone a specialist never told you to despite there being a small thought in your mind to the contrary?

Guess you're potentially a horrible, bloodthirsty criminal then. You totally belong in (lol can't get over this) Riker's ****ing island.

It's so damn sad it's funny. I'm half laughing, half crying, but nevertheless this is what I've come to expect from these totally uneducated, misinformed, psychopathic prosecutors.


Meh, you've found the most extreme outlier in history -- your odds of getting hit in the head with a meteor are much higher. Even the headline calls it a rare case. And the prosecutor apparently DID make the case that the specialist told him to admit the patient, even though the defendant claims he wasn't told, so we can't really buy that quote you listed -- a jury who listened to the specialist didn't buy the defendant's story...

Anyway, I wouldn't lose sleep over it -- these cases are rare, probably won't be you. But I don't blame the prosecutor here-- this guy did dig a pretty big hole for himself.

Simple negligence is what you should worry about. As mentioned you will make errors over your career, guaranteed. You won't go to jail for them but you'll possibly hurt people and maybe get sued. And that's not particularly rare. So that's what you should lose sleep over.
 
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Premed as your profile says? Former life in another career?

I've just witnessed and read about a lot of the nonsense that goes on.

Bottom line: You've got guys making legal decisions that frankly have no idea what they're talking about, because they usually have no real education in anything that's being discussed in the case. And then they either get the guy at the front, with no education on the particulars of the case, or, even worse, a jury of "one's peers" (a laughable statement if a college-educated defendant), to review and decide on the case. It's just not a very good system, which any barely cognizant person should be able to ascertain immediately.

So what I've said doesn't require some crazy level of experience with the legal system. It's one part ineptitude, one part poor execution, one part corruption, one part uncorroborated opinion, and a hundred parts power and connections that determine the outcome.

I'm assuming an even greater form of mal insurance would be this: Become good friends with all local judges/prosecutors in your area. Which, frankly, wouldn't be that hard to accomplish, because they definitely want docs to owe them favors.
 
Thank you everyone for the answer, I guess it's just my lack of medical knowledge and experience.
Which is understandable, seeing as how you're in high school...this is the reason we do not make kids make career decisions at age 16.
 
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