Kūpamaṇḍūka

This book is about the business of medical expert witnesses engaged in providing “certificates of merit” needed to file a litigation against healthcare professionals as well as providing expert witness testimony in Medical Malpractice cases in the courts.
According to institute of medicine and British Medical Journal, the Medical errors account for 98,000 to 250,000 deaths annually and there are there are only 16,000or so malpractice payments each year. Ninety percent of cases are settled out of court costing about $4.03 billion. The process of litigation is time consuming, taking 2-5 years in the courts, and expensive.
Many times, it is the most humiliating and depressing experience for both parties.
Currently, there are no scientific guidelines for the expert witnesses to abide by other than their education, experience, and license to practice while providing testimony. The current culture assumes that those providing expert witness testimony will do the right job defending science.
Ignorance, arrogance, careless review of medical records, anchor biases, confirmation biases, conformation biases, cognitive superiority biases, cognitive inferiority biases, hindsight biases, racial biases, academic verses rural physician biases, foreign medical graduate biases, and more are all rampant among the expert witnesses.
Money does play a role in the work of an expert witness, and it is not unusual to earn a wage of $500 an hour or more. Currently, there is no place for recourse for neglectful, careless, and bias work leading to wrongful conviction of the defendant.
Many developed countries have panels of medical experts, legal experts, and patient advocates to determine the validity of claims and compensation. There is a need for a fair and dignified systems, to not only compensate the injured but also to protect the people who did the right thing despite the bad outcomes.