By Evan Falchuk
Dr. Toni Brayer asks – is it dangerous for doctors to say “sorry?”
In the past, physicians were advised to never admit to a problem or to apologize for clinical errors with the thought that it would lead to more lawsuits. Saying “I’m sorry” might be taken by a lawyer as an admission of guilt and malpractice. Attorneys advised, “Say nothing” but that left patients with unanswered questions and often the feeling that the doctor just didn’t care.
She points out that some 35 states have passed laws that prevent a doctor’s apology from being used against him or her in proving a malpractice claim.
I understand why these kinds of laws may be needed. If you say you’re sorry for something, you are implicitly taking some degree of responsibility for whatever has happened. Plaintiff’s lawyers will use a doctor’s apology to the maximum extent possible to show the doctor knew what they did was wrong.
“Sorry” is, as wise people have observed, the hardest word in the English language. But why is this?
I think people like to think of themselves not as infallible in their actions but as infallible in their intentions. By this I mean, whatever I do, it will be with the right intentions. Even if something goes wrong, it will not be so much my fault so much as a bad twist of fate. Apologizing is, in this sense, a very un-natural thing to do. You haven’t done anything wrong.
But think of it from the perspective of the person who has been harmed by your actions. If you’ve hurt me in some way, I may conclude that the reason it happened wasn’t dumb luck but rather that you were careless, or at the least not concerned enough with my well-being. Your failure to apologize will look to me like my conclusions are right. You can’t even say you’re sorry? You must not care much about me at all.
It’s enough to make someone very angry. And it’s awfully easy for an angry person to find a lawyer who will listen to them. At that point, it’s too late for sorry.
Saying you’re sorry is so hard because it takes so much humility. We have to be willing to accept that not only are we imperfect in our actions, but we can also be imperfect in our intentions. Or at least that others may believe we are imperfect in our intentions. You have to be able to admit that, yes, it’s true, I wasn’t as attentive as I could have been. Or you know, you’re right, I can see why you would think I was being careless, I’m sorry for what I did.
So long as your apology is genuine, timely, and based on a true understanding of the problem you have caused, you will defuse the problem. But your work isn’t done. Apologizing doesn’t fix everything, it just gives you the opportunity to repair your relationship. So, saying sorry is not a cure for problems of medical malpractice, but it might prevent more cases than you think.
Still, there is something very wrong with the notion that we need to pass laws to make it so that an apology isn’t a legally dangerous thing to do. We should not look upon a doctor’s apology as something to be used against him, but rather as a sign of his humility and his caring for his fellow man.
If he has committed malpractice, there will be plenty of facts that can demonstrate it. Whether he acted as a good and caring person in dealing with the aftermath of a bad event ought not be one of them.
