When I worked in medical malpractice (don't worry; I'm purely a maritime lawyer these days!), I saw quite a lot of terrible screwups and negligence by radiologists in particular.
Everything from administering the wrong dose of radiation to radiating the wrong limb altogether to misreading the patient's chart then irradiating a guy's lungs using the wrong angles and intensities, thus causing a near-fatal respiratory crisis.
This was very strange to me, since radiologists are supposed to be some of the best-trained, best-paid doctors of all.
Our suspicion was that radiology has a lot of drunks for some reason. We even called them "radiolodrunks" in our internal firm memos.
These seemed like very smart, well-trained doctors who just made basic, inexplicable errors - and they made enough errors to keep us busy in settlement proceedings for years on end.
Why is this? Why do radiologists like to drink so much, and why do they screw up so often relative to other doctors, despite having so much training?
Nessariana
They're human and doctors. End of story.
phantomlimb7
You are basing your perception on a limited and biased experience. So the rationale for your statement is not supported by the circumstances. You worked in the area of medical malpractice, therefore all you were going to see were treatments and therapies gone wrong, and medical malfeasance.
Statistically speaking, radiologist (especially the interventional kind you cite) probably don't 'screw up' on average any more often than surgeons (who remove healthy tissue or the wrong limb on occasion), internal medicine docs (who miss infections, or injuries) or psychiatrists (who fail to detect suicidal intent in their patient).
There is an old saying which goes 'if you look for evil in every man, you will surely find it.'
I could make biased assumptions about lawyers based on my personal experience now, couldn't I?
Bear
Goodness, sorry this is so lengthy, I didn't realize how much I got carried away!
Excellent question!!! Let me try to offer whatever insight I can. Please let me clarify a couple things to start off... At least in the US today (and I suspect pretty much throughout the West), radiologists are those physicians who limit themselves to imaging-based diagnosis with the sole exception of Interventional Radiologists who use catheter/guidewire-based techniques in the treatment of diseases from head to toe. The actual use of radiation in the treatment of disease is limited to radiation oncologists which are a unique specialty with unique training (the one exception is nuclear medicine where there is a bit of overlap with radiation oncologists with respect to radioactive iodine-based treatment of thyroid disease with radiation oncologists), and I simply don't know anything about their malpractice rates, so I'll restrict my discussion to diagnostic radiology.
Yeah, you are right when you say that radiologists have a relatively high rate of suits for supposed negligence, but drinking or drug abuse doesn't seem to play a role in this anymore than other specialists (I laugh as I look back at the description of "a lot of drunks" in the question).
Training in radiology is extensive, especially today. To put this in perspective, here's what a typical American radiologist needs to get through in order to hang his or her shingle out: After getting a bachelor's degree (typically with an awfully high GPA and MCAT scores), being accepted into med school in the US (let's be frank here, radiology is a competitive residency that foreign medical grads are seldom accepted into these days). After finishing med school, following a preliminary/transitional year, typically in medicine but some prefer doing their internship in surgery, only upon completion of this preliminary year can the physician in training even enter radiology residency. The residency in radiology is a mentally challenging four years that ensues. There's an awful lot of people who presume this to be a cake walk only to realize all too often that it's anything but. There's a tremendous amount of information which must be mastered during this time which isn't even touched upon in medical school. Consider that the radiologist is the consultant to all other specialists when it comes to medical imaging. After working a full day, a resident has to master a tremendous volume of text (pretty bland stuff too) at home while others may be resting. That's not to say that residents in other specialties don't read, but radiologists have to master the ten or so sections which they will be tested on in order to earn board certification. We're talking: pediatric radiology, chest, uroradiology, ultrasonography, gastrointestinal imaging, neuroradiology, vascular & interventional radiology, mammography, muskuloskeletal radiology, nuclear medicine and even cardiac imaging and so forth. It's an awful lot of knowledge that the radiologist needs to be well-versed in.
There is a huge amount of medical imaging studies that are ordered in the era of super-fast CTs and extraordinarily powerful MR magnets. Despite this, the number of residents who graduate to fill the needs of a given community remains fixed. There's ever increasing pressure on radiologists to read more studies and read them faster given the decreased coverage that medicare offers per study. The problem is that there's a limit to how fast even the most experienced radiologist can read a given study which may contain hundreds of images, any one which may reveal totally unexpected findings, with zero tolerance accepted for errors or omissions while examining everything that's available.
There's an inordinate amount of lawsuits for negligence in mammography. Radiologists will read hundreds of mammograms each day and are expected to find a needle in a haystack. Breast cancer is a slow-growing malignancy, typically, and mammography, by its very nature, opens itself up to tremendous opportunity for litigation. Considering the volume of mammos that have to be read by radiologists, it's often a matter of time before even the best radiologists walk into a mass that can be traced back to a tiny spec, retrospectively. Many patients & their attorneys exploit this inherent issue with mammography in order to achieve their goal.
The second issue unique to radiology is that the radiologist is a hidden member of the patient's treatment team. What seems to protect most physicians from litigation (whether frivolous or otherwise) is that the patient sees a human being in front of them... someone with a family who is fallible, someone that they feel bad about suing. Such is not the case with radiologists. This critical layer of protection is something that radiologists don't have the luxury of being protected with.
I think it's this combination of a tremendous volume of potential human errors that can be made, a litigious society, the unique issues of mammography which lends itself to lawsuits and finally the faceless nature of being a radiologist which makes them an easy target for malpractice suits.
GaryR
Actually, almost none of your premise is accurate nor true. Radiology does not have "a lot of drunks" beyond that found among lawyers or any other profession. In fact, I've known a lot more drunken lawyers than I have drunken doctors. If a lawyer is drunk, his client goes to jail. But if a doctor is drunk, his clients often go to the grave. It's a self-regulating system for the most part. I think you have a heck of a big axe to grind for some reason you haven't revealed, and are trying to fish for people who will tell you, "oh, yeah, yeah, those terrible drunken radiologists, they're just awful, etc." Sorry, fella... didn't work with us. We know better. Every single Radiologist i have ever worked around has universally been very caring and competent, and have done their very best to perform professionally. Medicine can be more of an art than a science. When you're looking at a law, you can look in a lawbook and find it clearly written in chapter 23, paragraph 22. That is NOT true of medicine. Many disorders are very difficult to diagnose, and can escape the scrutiny of the most careful Radiologist or Diagnostician. It's all part of the imperfect science of medicine, which makes practicing medicine so difficult, and which feeds so many drunken parasitic lawyers their huge undeserved wages that buy them more cases of liquor. (See, two can play your game.)
Pangolin
*cheers on Gary*
Nothing to add. Would give that answer more thumbs up if I had more thumbs.
greydoc6
I'll answer this from the aspect of a community physician. Most of the radiologists I dealt with were in an academic environment, and they were brilliant. I thought that most of the radiologists I knew in the (non-academic) community were also of excellent quality, but there were a select few who where really sub-par. I think this is true of all medical specialties, and holds true for lawyers, too.
Orignal From: Why do radiologists screw up so often compared to other doctors?
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