Adv Mind Body Med. He further contends that those values have been growing stronger in recent decades. Surely US litigiousness is a factor in the big picture, but litigiousness in general cannot explain the current circumstances of medical malpractice. Americans were extremely litigious well before medical malpractice appeared on the scene, and the rate of medical malpractice suits rose less steeply in the years Kakaiya cites than in several earlier decades of US history. Moreover, other professional groups in the United States historically have been sued far less often than physicians and do not now face major malpractice crises of their own.
Some estimates put that second number many times higher.
From a historical point of view, the wonder is not how many litigation-prone Americans have been suing their physicians in recent decades, but how few. The latter have brought our historically ad hoc system of individual liability insurance to the edge of financial irrationality, without providing compensation to the vast majority of patients who might deserve some redress. That troubling reality underscores the need to consider overarching societal values, along with all of the other interacting dynamics in the modern malpractice tangle, in long-term historical context. I have written elsewhere about the history of medical expert witnessing, which has long presented problems in the context of our adversarial legal system. By themselves, however, those problems have never justified abandoning the system.