Defensive Medicine or Careful Medicine?

Many doctors practice “defensive medicine” even knowing that it might drive up costs, waste time, and ultimately be unnecessary. The United States Congress Office of Technology Assessment formally describes defensive medicine as “when doctors order tests, procedures, or visits, or avoid high-risk patients or procedures primarily (but not necessarily solely) to reduce their exposure to malpractice liability.”

One ethics survey done in 2014 found that most doctors said that they have or would employ defensive medicine as a way to protect themselves, mainly from your threat of a medical malpractice suit.

Healthcare professionals recognize that defensive medicine is an important cause of increasing healthcare costs and do want to see the issue addressed as a problem.  An example of how this problem could be addressed is the Ottawa Ankle Rules, published at the Ottawa Civic Hospital in Canada. These policies establish a complete system of evaluation to determine which patients need x-rays to analyze a fracture in place of giving a costly x-ray to any patient with any kind of foot pain.

Physicians are very aware of the threat of malpractice lawsuits during their careers. For this reason, defensive medicine is unlikely to just go away. Many doctors view defensive medicine as careful medicine since it is one way to safeguard their careers.

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