Fear of Lawsuits Drives Doctors to Test and Test and Test

Why do doctors order so many tests? If the results of a new study are anything to go by, doctors are more afraid of being sued for malpractice than they are of suffering the wrath of patients and/or insurance companies over the costs of those tests.

A stunning 90 percent of doctors surveyed in a recent study (published in Archives of Internal Medicine) of more than 1,200 physicians across the U.S. reported that they erred on the side of more and more testing and treating in order to protect themselves from the dreaded malpractice lawsuit — which might come anyway. Buttressing many of the fears cited by the doctors involved in the study was data from malpractice lawyers suggesting that too little testing was an allegation of many a malpractice lawsuit. Yet how much is too little and how much is too much? These days, more and more doctors are not wanting to get anywhere near "too little," especially in the emergency room, where the sometimes life-or-death margin is razor-thin.

Testing to uncover reasons for symptoms or to head off diseases or debilitating conditions (read: defensive medicine) is good, standard medical practice and has been so for a great many years. But in the day of the all-too-easy lawsuit, many doctors are looking to protect their livelihood by possibly overestimating the need to look into the livelihood of their patients. "Better safe than sorry," but safety has degrees and thresholds, unlike the menace of a malpractice suit, which seemingly knows no bounds or minimums.

Medical malpractice insurance rates are through the roof and show no signs of coming down out of the sky. Doctors live in fear of misdiagnosing, mis-treating, and just plain missing things. Being human, doctors will make mistakes. (And it's all well and good to argue that doctors have people's lives in their hands, but the same could be said for bus drivers, airline pilots, construction workers, teachers, and other people to whom we hand over our safety for bits of time each and every day. We can certainly file a lawsuit against a bus driver who crashes the bus we're on or the construction worker who doesn't seal off the building site properly, resulting in an injury; but those people live in nowhere near the amount of fear or trepidation that doctors do.

A secondary result of all this expensive medical insurance is that rural areas are attracting fewer and fewer doctors because the physicians can't afford to make a living above and beyond the extraordinarily high costs of insurance, malpractice and otherwise.

If doctors are ordering too many tests because they're afraid of being sued, then we've got a runaway lawsuit culture. This has been the case for years in other areas, and the results of this latest study only better support that assertion.