Fed up with the rising number of medical malpractice suits filed against them, doctors in Illinois have begun to launch legal counterattacks. With advice from their state medical society, which has set up a $500,000 malpractice war chest, four Illinois physicians have filed suits of their own against patients and their lawyers who are suing them.
One of the cases involves Dr. Eugene R. Balthazar, the founder of a highly regarded free clinic in Aurora, Ill. (TIME, Jan. 26), who was accused of malpractice by a woman treated for a facial malignancy. Though the patient’s suit was tossed out of court, Balthazar and a colleague felt that they had been needlessly harassed. Charging “reckless disregard for the truth” and malicious prosecution, they are seeking only nominal damages of $2 from the woman but $20,600 from her two lawyers. Another Illinois doctor has taken a different stance: he has charged a patient’s lawyer with barratry (frivolously stirring up litigation). If convicted, the lawyer could face disbarment proceedings.
Indeed, the Illinois State Medical Society feels that overeager attorneys are often the instigators of malpractice suits. At times, says Joel Edelman, the society’s counsel, lawyers bring suit against doctors without even consulting with the patient, simply listing all medical personnel remotely connected with the case. In a suit involving four Chicago-area hospitals, 116 people were named as defendants, half of them nurses.
Doctors elsewhere in the U.S. are fighting back. The journal Medical Economics reports that one oral surgeon in the East was awarded $4,500 in damages, plus costs, from a patient who had claimed malpractice. At a preliminary hearing in Fort Pierce, Fla., a judge recently set a Florida precedent by letting stand an orthopedic surgeon’s charge of “malicious prosecution” in his separate $1.5 million countersuits against two former patients and their lawyers. Though the cases have yet to be tried, the doctor’s attorney, Ellis Rubin, thinks that they have already had a chastening effect in the area. “Suddenly,” he says, “lawyers are very cautious about accepting malpractice cases.”
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