By Nathan Seppa
The notion that many medical-malpractice lawsuits are frivolous and intended to generate undeserved riches for plaintiffs and their lawyers isn’t borne out in a new study.
A review of almost 1,500 randomly selected malpractice lawsuits in the United States finds that instances of healthy people successfully suing a doctor for malpractice are exceedingly rare and are far outnumbered by cases in which a patient injured by medical error goes uncompensated, health-policy researchers report in the May 11 New England Journal of Medicine.