A Boston, MA jury awarded $2.5 million in damages to a woman who was told she had the HIV virus, then underwent treatment for almost nine years before learning she never contracted the virus. As a result of the potent cocktail of dangerous drugs she took to kill the virus she never had, the woman suffered numerous side effects, including depression, fatigue, loss of weight and appetite, and inflamed intestines, all of which no doubt confirmed the AIDS hypothesis in the minds of doctors and nurses. However, what makes this case of medical malpractice so grievous and why the punitive amount in this case is far too small, is that the misdiagnosis was made on purely anecdotal evidence, and never once, during almost nine years of treatment, was the women given definitive tests to confirm the presence of HIV.
The doctor claims that the woman said she had worked as a prostitute, that her partner had AIDS, and that she had suffered three bouts of a type of pneumonia commonly found in AIDS sufferers. In addition, the woman had elevated counts of immuno-response cells in her bloodstream. The woman denies she was a prostitute, does admit that a former boyfriend tested positive for HIV/AIDS, and it seems unlikely that the woman said she had suffered bouts of Pneumocystis pneumonia.
But none of this is particularly important, since even if a woman was a prostitute and had bouts of Pneumocystis pneumonia, somewhere in nine years of treatment, a definitive test should have administered. Even if doctors wanted to begin the treatment immediately to aggressively combat the virus, when blood monitoring began and showed no presence of the virus, someone should have taken Othello’s advice and said, “Be sure of it ; give me the ocular proof.” Not to administer the test is a gross example of medical negligence.
Although doctors often have to make judgment calls where evidence is incomplete and action must be taken immediately to save a life, whenever possible, medicine should fall back on its basis, which is science, not art. Doctors should not turn a lifestyle or a social background or an ethnicity into a diagnosis, and when they do this, they should be severely penalized for their medical malpractice. If you have gone to a doctor and received treatment based not on medicine, but on the doctor’s personal biases about your race, sex, or lifestyle, contact the experienced medical malpractice attorney, Barry G. Doyle, in Chicago, for a consultation.
