Owners outraged over botched surgeries, medication errors, misdiagnoses
———————————————————————–
By JoNel Aleccia Health writer
msnbc.com
Jared Genser was a day away from euthanizing his family dog, Finnegan, when the Washington, D.C. lawyer discovered that the lab’s diagnosis of a painful and deadly bone cancer was wrong.
Jenn Diederich of Riverton, Utah, sent her dog, Ted, for surgery to repair a torn ligament in a right rear leg, only to find that the veterinarian had operated on the left leg instead.
And Stefani Olsen of Silver Spring, Md., returned from a weekend business trip to discover that the clinic where she’d boarded her elderly diabetic cat, Toonces, had overdosed him with 10 times the amount of insulin he needed, leaving the animal blind, wracked with seizures and suffering from severe brain damage that lasted until his death.
“It goes beyond heartbreak,” said Olsen, a 45-year-old health information technician who’d had the 15-year-old cat since he was a kitten.
If any of these mistakes had occurred in human patients, they’d be classified as medical errors worthy of investigation, public reporting and professional discipline, including dismissal. Wrong-site surgery and medication overdoses, for instance, are among the so-called “never events” regarded as inexcusable in a human health care setting.
But because the errors occurred in animals, owners and advocates say they were ignored, minimized or outright denied by a system that devalues the bond between pets and their owners and fails to hold veterinarians sufficiently accountable when they make mistakes.
————————–
‘Woefully inadequate’
————————–
“When someone’s companion animal is injured by a veterinarian, their choices are between slim and none,” said Joyce Tischler, founder and general counselor for the Animal Legal Defense Fund, a Cotati, Calif., group that fields several calls a month about pet medical errors.
“Action against veterinarians is woefully inadequate,” she added.
Owners of injured animals say they’re stunned to discover state veterinary boards that dismiss up to 80 percent of the complaints filed against their members, and a legal system that regards pets as mere property, with no way to recover damages for emotional loss.
Laws vary, but in most state courts animals are worth their market value, plus perhaps any economic value they generate for their owners, Tischler said. That could be a considerable amount of money for a high-value show dog or a racehorse, for instance, but for most household pets, it’s not.
“If you have a 10-year-old mixed-breed dog, the value of that dog is generally considered to be under $100,” Tischler said. “It’s a sad situation, it’s an unfair situation for people who care about their animals and are quite shocked to find when their animal is killed or injured they cannot sue.”
But industry advocates and vets themselves say that such rhetoric overstates the problem. They contend that mistakes occur only in a tiny fraction of the nearly 190 million for veterinary visits for dogs, cats, birds and horses each year, and that there is adequate monitoring and discipline when they do happen.
“I guess I don’t agree that there is a lot of malpractice out there,” said Adrian Hochstadt, assistant director of state
legislative and regulatory affairs for the American Veterinary Medical Association, which represents about 80,000 vets.
“If there are negligent doctors — and there are probably a few in every system — if it’s a big problem, it would have been addressed by legislation,” he added.
——————————
No tracking of vet errors
——————————
It’s difficult to know how often medical errors occur in pets. The AVMA collects no statistics on veterinary malpractice suits, Hochstadt said, and the group’s associated Professional Liability Insurance Trust, or PLIT, which offers malpractice insurance for vets, refused to release numbers or outcomes of such cases.
One small study of veterinary errors, a 2004 paper published in the journal Veterinary Record, found that 78 percent of recent veterinary graduates surveyed in Scotland and England admitted making a mistake that could have endangered an animal. It’s not clear whether those results can be extrapolated to the larger profession, however.
In the absence of better data, most industry experts look to human medicine, where medical errors kill as many as 98,000 people a year, and likely more, according to a decade-old Institute of Medicine report widely regarded as a baseline.
“There’s no reason to think that it’s so different than what occurs in humans,” said Kathleen Bonvicini, chief executive of the Institute for Healthcare Communication Inc., a New Haven, Conn., nonprofit that had to add sessions on veterinary errors several years ago to address a growing demand.
The AVMA stands by the state discipline system, Hochstadt said. At the same time, the group has staunchly opposed efforts to allow courts to impose non-economic damages for animals, arguing that the move would drive up costs, push vets out of the profession and create many of the problems found in the medical malpractice realm
for humans.
“Our position is that the current legal structure is working well,” Hochstadt said.
That sentiment outrages some pet owners, prompting them to take their plight to the Internet. Greg Munson, 44, a Mesquite, Texas, businessman created the Web site www.vetsfromhell.net after the 2005 death of his beloved 8-year-old Shih Tzu, Stempy, from an alleged veterinary error after surgery for a bladder stone.
Munson’s site, which features flaming letters and “story after story of EVIL Vets from HELL,” was designed to gain attention — and prompt action, Munson said.
“Vets in this country literally get away with murder,” Munson said. “Even when a vet board does hold a vet accountable, it’s nothing more than a slap on the wrist.”
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////
P.S. So what is the REAL instance of Veterinary Errors?
Well we don’t know, except that by comparison, Doctors are the 3rd leading cause of death in the U.S. – causing 250,000 deaths a year- and that is according to stats from JAMA.
Our dog and cat population is approx 1/3 of the human population- by comparison that could mean 100,000 pets dying a year due to Veterinary Error.
My point of all this is that it happens- and because there is NO central reporting of it, we Don’t know the real numbers.
Don’t let your pet become one of these stats. Become an EMPOWERED Pet Owner.
Learn more at Pamper Pet Care
Leave a reply