I think we need to take responsibility for our actions. Somewhere along the way, blaming others for our mistakes or even for our bad luck has become the norm. Anytime something bad happens, it seems that someone else must be blamed.
A good part of this societal attitude change has to do with our legal system. One gets rewarded financially if personal responsibility can be minimized and victimization maximized.
We were all outraged by the story of the lawsuit by the lady at McDonalds who won millions by claiming the coffee was too hot that she spilled on herself. We all shake our heads in disbelief when we read about the burglar who hurts himself breaking into a residence and then sues the property owner.
Locally the students from Knightstown High School received a large settlement ordered by the court which ruled that the children's freedom of speech was being violated by their expulsion for the creation of a DVD that demeaned and threatened a teacher. Since the students were reinstated, wouldn't it have sent a wonderful message about responsibility if those families had donated their lawsuit proceeds back to the school or community?
You cannot watch television or read a newspaper without seeing an ad by a lawyer who wants you to sue someone just because you used a product even if you never suffered any ill effects. The only people who make any significant amount of money from class-action lawsuits are the lawyers but we all sign on in an attempt to get money for nothing.
Lawsuits are justified if a company knowingly allows an unsafe product to be available to consumers without informing people of the risks. If the risks are obvious then no financial recourse should be available if harm occurs.
You should not be allowed to sue a fast-food restaurant just because you became obese by eating their product. Your family should not be allowed to sue the hair dryer manufacturer if you get electrocuted using it while in the bathtub regardless of whether or not there is a warning sticker on the product.
There are many examples of lawyers and patients becoming millionaires from lawsuits which are based on bad luck, bad science, and bad lifestyle choices of patients.
John Edwards, one of the democratic presidential candidates, made his fortune as a lawyer by suing doctors over cases in which babies were born with cerebral palsy or other birth defects. From studies on placentas, science clearly shows us that the vast majority of infants afflicted had the damage occur during the earlier trimesters and that the bad outcome was predetermined before the onset of labor and delivery. That didn't stop the blaming of the delivery room doctors in many cases.
The Dow chemical company went bankrupt defending lawsuits over claims of illness arising over the use of silicon breast implants. Despite multiple studies without a single one showing any link between the implants and any disease in the women receiving them, lawyers and patients got rich. The medical and scientific facts didn't seem to enter into the jury decisions. Science eventually won out over the hysteria and the products are again available.
A generation or two of underground coal miners in Kentucky and West Virginia, and of course their lawyers, profited from the black-lung myth. While black-lung disease can show changes on x-rays, it only rarely causes any type of disability. The symptoms these patients had been almost exclusively from smoking. Studies found that the more time a miner spent underground, the less respiratory problems they had despite worse looking x-rays. The reason was they weren't allowed to smoke while in the mines and therefore had less tobacco exposure than those who worked above ground.
This brings to mind the case of the cigarette companies. It is abundantly documented that the adverse health effects of cigarettes were well known to the manufacturers many years before they were known to the health care community. Since this information was hidden from consumers, patients did not have all the facts needed to make fully informed choices on the use of tobacco products. The recent multi-state attorney generals' lawsuit was appropriate in this case.
In medicine, not all bad outcomes are someone's fault. It clearly can be, such as the incident with the wrong dose of heparin given to the babies at Methodist. But just as sometimes a bad outcome occurs despite good care, so too sometimes good outcomes occur despite suboptimal care. As long as physicians are human, mistakes will be made. The majority of which fortunately do not harm anyone.
If you are obese and smoke with poorly controlled diabetes and hypertension, don't blame the doctor or the drug company if you have a heart attack or stroke. If you exercise regularly and have a healthy diet and lifestyle, you have more of a right to look for other factors that may have led to a heart attack or stroke. Responsibility must always lie first with the individual.
To automatically assume that a poor outcome was the fault of someone else is naive and pompous. God heals and God calls people home. In our society, the tendency to place blame on someone every time a patient is stricken by or doesn't fully recover from a disease or illness, is as harmful as it is popular.
