Free Republic

A man who spent nearly 20 years locked in a state psychiatric ward in Lincoln is suing doctors for malpractice, saying he was never mentally ill during his time there. He was sent to the Lincoln Regional Center that year. For the next 20 years, regional center doctors and others involved in Montin's treatment relied on information from initial police reports that said Montin was delusional, rather than court records that showed otherwise. But last year, a regional center psychiatrist found that it was medicine Montin had taken for his injured back that had led to a medication-induced psychosis. When...

Fact: A doctor in this country interrupts a patient, on average, in the first 18 seconds of a visit. A prominent surgeon waited about a minute and a half before issuing his diagnosis to Jerome Groopman on his damaged hand. "He was dead wrong," says Groopman, who got four diagnoses from six surgeons. "And these are big names." Fact: More than 15 percent — some say more than 20 percent — of medical diagnoses are wrong. At least half result in serious injury or death. Groopman tells of a woman who saw close to 30 doctors for a constellation of...