Often in my world patients often are explicitly or implicitly blamed for the harm that has happened to them. It is not the provider’s fault this happened: it’s yours. You should have gone back to the ER when you didn’t improve; you should have told the doctor about your symptom; you should have lost weight, or stopped smoking, or gone to see a therapist.
This patient blame doesn’t only exist in medical malpractice litigation. It also exists in the day to day health care provided around the country. I’ll give you two examples:
We have not yet figured out how to stop people from being infected with various bacteria and viruses in hospitals. Whether it’s because of inadequate handwashing, relaxed standards for dress in operating rooms, improper cleaning of rooms or medical devices, some other reason, or a combination of many factors, the CDC reports that 1.7 million Americans are infected in hospital settings.
The CDC calls these “Health care-associated infections” (HAIs), but the more common term is “Hospital Acquired Infections” (also HAI). This, to me, is a curious name for what happens to nearly 2 million of us every year. It sounds like the patient was at an open-air market and happened by a particular piece of art she “acquired” to put on a wall in her living room.
Most egregious in my mind is when a surgeon or other health care provider leaves behind a sponge, surgical instrument, or something else inside of a surgical patient prior to sewing them back up. Those items are “retained” in the language of medicine, as in “Joe retained a retractor in his abdomen during surgery”. Sounds about as innocuous as a shirt retaining its color after a number of washes. And certainly, the action in the verb implies that it was Joe – under general anesthesia, totally unconscious – that did the retaining.
If Joe really did actively retain an instrument from the hospital, shouldn’t he give it back? Or at least reimburse the hospital for the expense of replacing it? Isn’t that theft? Of course not, but the plain language used to describe both HAIs and retained foreign objects is to subtly shift the action of obtaining an unwanted medical condition from the health care provider to the patient.
