As a medical student, I was taught to engage with patients, listen to what they had to say and take a good history. The practice of medicine was a little different. Patients were often reduced to a label (the burst colostomy bag up in gastro), a set of results (the woman with crap LFTs), acronyms (the man with SS and MODS in ICU), or organs (the Spleen in room 10). Short hand descriptions of cases promoted efficiency, and helped with the necessary professional detachment. Learning how to practise good medicine requires something more. Learning by rote what set of symptoms and signs were associated with what list of conditions, does not help you think when you are dealing with a live patient. You need to know a bit more about the person you are dealing with. They can lead you to the source of the problem. Listening and observing are important.

When I became a lawyer, I had similar experiences. Plaintiffs are ‘punters’ represented by pieces of paper. Lawyers involved in “broken bones” work (often thought as the inferior branch of the profession) talk about “quads”, “nervous shock”, “paras” or again as organs (the Spleen). Lawyers tend to think they know everything about a person simply by reading a strident opinion about a ‘punter’ after a 30-minute consultation with an expert. Judgements are made about people without knowing anything about them. A label can influence the whole of a case even though it fails woefully in describing the person one is dealing with.

What am I trying to say? The point is that there are some medical cases that have stayed with me not just because they were interesting medically but because I remembered the human story that went with it. The same is true of legal cases. The underlying human story is a key reason why I can remember many cases in excruciating detail. It occurred to me that medical students and doctors would be more likely to remember a critical point of practice if they can connect it with a human story. It is far easier to remember that unexplained weight loss could be something to do with a cancer if you recall a story about how this was missed by a physician and the effect it had on a young man and his family.

The lessons we have winnowed from our many cases in Why Patients Sue Doctors are quite simple, but it is amazing how often they are overlooked. I hope that by recalling the stories, doctors will think twice about acting in the same way as their peers.