In this age of defensive medicine, where doctors run every possible test for every possibility, the likelihood of a misdiagnosis is small. When all science says there is nothing wrong and the patient essentially demands medication what is a doctor to do? Follow the science, do nothing, allowing the patient to seek a doctor that may have less ethics and prescribes an actual medication from which the patient dies of a side effect?
In the realm of malpractice "claims", many of them have nothing to do with the practice of medicine. The data reflects that most are without merit and have the appearance of an attempt to engineer a lottery win. Most of which goed to the legal community!

Quote Originally Posted by SadisticNature View Post
I still find the idea that you think doctors should be able to give placebo's to patients is grossly inconsistent with your stated desire to lower malpractice claims.

I'm not saying doctors are going to be wrong often with placebo's but I think even if they are wrong 1 time in 1000 patients that is going to be a large number of lawsuits. I think the claim that doctors aren't perfect is rather reasonable and backed up by the data.

Even if 999 out of 1000 patients that are given placebo's do better than those who are not, the doctors have no business giving out placebo's because when they are wrong its going to be a serious mistake.

What kind of damages do you think an insurance company will have to pay when the following situation occurs:

(i) Doctor diagnoses patient as a hypochondriac
(ii) Doctor proscribes placebo
(iii) Patient thinks placebo is working and doesn't see a doctor again until their next regular checkup.
(iv) Patients symptoms were actually related to cancer which is discovered at this checkup roughly a year later.
(v) Patient eventually dies as a result of the cancer.

In situations like this the damages can be colossal because for many cancers survival rates are very good for early diagnosis, while for later diagnosis survival rates are far worse. Cases like these are easy to win and easier to get a big settlement on, because the doctor is involved in deceiving the patient which results in them not seeking other treatments or care.