Whenever a patient has a bad outcome, the knee-jerk reflex is to blame the doctor and assume that the doctor made a mistake. The relatives gang up and want to beat up the doctor and the media is quite happy to add fuel to the fire by holding the doctor guilty, without ever bothering to drill down to find the truth of the matter. However, most bad outcomes are not because of medical negligence. The truth is that no matter how good the medical care is provided to the patients, not all of them will get better, because there are so many variables in a biological system as complex as the human body.
The problem is that it's hard to explain this after the patient has a problem. At this time, everyone is angry and upset, and the doctor is defensive, scared and vulnerable. He tends to clamp up, and this makes matters even worse, because the relatives feel that the doctor is hiding the truth…
