Opinion ID: 1138143
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Inevitable Ascendency of National Standards

Text: In 1971, we faced a strong attack on the continuing validity and viability of the locality rule in Dazet v. Bass, 254 So.2d 183 (Miss. 1971). On that occasion we were advised that physicians now attend the same colleges, receive the same post graduate courses in their specialities, and go to the same seminars, that the standards of care for a specialist should be and are the same throughout the country, and that geographical conditions or circumstances are no longer valid as controlling the standards of a specialist's care or competence. 254 So.2d at 187. Though we rejected plaintiff's case on procedural grounds, we recognized in Dazet that the point has considerable force. 254 So.2d at 187. The continued force of the point is evidenced by the step forward taken in King v. Murphy . We would have to put our heads in the sand to ignore the nationalization of medical education and training. Medical school admission standards are similar across the country. Curricula are substantially the same. Internship and residency programs for those entering medical specialities have substantially common components. Nationally uniform standards are enforced in the case of certification of specialists. Differences and changes in these areas occur temporally, not geographically. Physicians are far more mobile than they once were. They frequently attend medical school in one state, do a residency in another, establish a practice in a third and after a period of time relocate to a fourth. All the while they have ready access to professional and scientific journals and seminars for continuing medical education from across the country. Common sense and experience inform us that the laws of medicine do not vary from state to state in anything like the manner our public law does. King v. Murphy represents a recognition by this Court of what has long been an established fact: that the medical centers in Memphis, Birmingham, Mobile, New Orleans and other nearby areas in adjoining states are a very real part of the Mississippi-centered universe of hospitalization, medical care and treatment and other health related services. Medicine is a science, though its practice be an art (as distinguished from a business). Regarding the basic matter of the learning, skill and competence a physician may bring to bear in the treatment of a given patient, state lines are largely irrelevant. That a patient's temperature is 105 degrees means the same in New York as in Mississippi. Bones break and heal in Washington the same as in Florida, in Minnesota the same as in Texas. An abnormal blood sugar count should be interpreted in California as in Illinois as in Tennessee. A patient's physiological response to an exploratory laparotomy and needs regarding post-operative care following such surgery do not vary from Ohio to Mississippi. A pulse rate of 140 per minute provides a danger signal in Pascagoula, Mississippi, the same as it does in Cleveland, Ohio. Bacteria, physiology and the life process itself know little of geography and nothing of political boundaries. It is absurd to think that a physician examining a patient in his or her office would, by reference to the genuine health care needs of the patient, say: Because I practice in Mississippi (or the Deep South), I will make this diagnosis and prescribe this medication and course of treatment, but if I were in Iowa, I would do otherwise. We are confident (as the medical community of this state is no doubt confident) that Mississippi's physicians are capable of rendering and do in fact render a quality of care on a par with that in other parts of the country.