Hood Mentality

The consequence of hood mentality.In the hood, lots of folks are looking for a payday. Be it by "falling down" at the grocery store, or selling things on the street that....sell. A great number of people bitch and complain about paying a $50 copay, but pull up in a pimped out Escalade with spinning wheels and a $400 cell phone. The ultimate consumers.Well, in medicine this trend continues. And, apparently, many of the frivolous lawsuits are initiated by people just looking for a payday at someone else's expense.At the Kingdom, there was this young guy...who was racing his motorcycle on the freeway. He fell, got crushed, and was brought in to our trauma center. The surgeons patched him up, but after a month long ICU stay (and hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills paid for by you and me), he still couldn't walk. He had a pelvic fracture that required a 'special' (complicated) orthopedic procedure to *possibly* correct his problem. There were only a couple of orthopods in the city who performed this procedure. The issue was, the 'complicated' surgery was very labor intensive, time intensive, and the end-result was based largely on patient compliance...and evenso, the results were unpredictable. The surgeon was concerned that the patient: 1) wouldn't/couldn't pay him, so he'd be working essentially for free. 2) then the patient is a dumbass, and will probably *not* be compliant with follow-up 3) and finally, when the results weren't what the patient expects (which would be 'p...
Source: EM Physician - Backstage Pass - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Source Type: blogs