Holding for “Obstetrics before “malpractice madness” made everyone crazy

Obstetrics before “malpractice madness” made everyone crazy

As a labor room nurse in the early 1960s, both GPs and obstetricians delivered breeches and twins vaginally, with little or no ‘special’ attention or preparation. Both of these situations were considered a variation of normal vaginal birth and the outcomes for these mothers and babies were consistent with those of other normal vaginal births.

However, this was before the “one-two punch” that changed the practice of medicine in America forever!

The ‘punch’ was a fateful decision by the United States Supreme Court (1964?) who ruled that all MDs, irrespective of what part of the country they practiced in, were legally held to the same basic and universal “medical standard of care” (more later).

Then in 1976, the medical profession was again turned upside down by the infamous “malpractice crisis of 1976“. The problem was the audacity of the medical malpractice insurance industry to raise its rates (a lot!) and in particular, the rates for doctors in Southern California. One cannot help but assume that wealthy movie stars and their expensive ‘no-holds-barred’ attorneys sued their doctors each and every time their newest face-life was not to their liking.

Of course, these same doctor were not going to take this laying down. Theoretically under a blood-red banner that read:

“Up With This We Will Not Put!”

… all the doctors in Southern California banded together and staged a real-life “doctors’ strike” that lasted almost a month or so. Sometime later, when state mortality statistics for that period became available, newspapers and nightly TV news reported a precipitous FALL in the mortality rate while doctors were refusing to doctor and surgeons were refusing to put up a scalpel and incise!

As expected, older (and usually wiser) doctors of that era insisted that the practice of medicine would never be the same again and apparently they were right!