Description
*This is the Hard Cover Version. Soft Cover Version can be located here.*
A medical procedure which results in unexpected suffering, disability, or even death plunges the patient, family, the physician responsible, and the hospital involved into the abyss of the tragic. Since the ancient Greeks, our response to the inescapable tragic dimension of life has revealed our species’ moral worth.
In the United States today, the almost obligatory response to medical deviation is to launch a vengeful lawsuit for malpractice. America’s recent pandemic of opportunistic lawsuits against competent physicians who unintentionally inflict harm while sincerely striving to preserve life, is cannibalistically destroying the profession vowed by compassion to preserve our lives.
This author faced the possibility of suing an emergency room physician and his hospital following a tragic medical miscalculation which inflicted upon her husband irreparable harm. After months of silent introspection, however, she consciously chose not to sue after reasoning that compassion, mercy, and forgiveness extended toward those responsible was not only morally appropriate, but psychically commensurate with the fundamental goodness of every human heart.
Pandemic of Opportunism is recommended for all those who daily deal with the powerful emotions and psychological disruption which result from medical error – for doctors and nurses themselves, for attorneys, psychologists, grief counselors, Hospice professionals, clergy of all faiths, as well as for loved ones of patients and for all families who will most likely face in their own futures the choice to extend toward the medical profession itself the same compassion which that profession mercifully extends toward them.
David Braughler –
From the Foreword, by Dr. Erika Grushon:
In her latest book, Pandemic of Opportunism, Sarah Seymour-Winfield guides the reader along a remarkable journey from the darkness of her personal despair following a medical miscalculation onward toward the light of hope.
She paints a realistic and sensitive portrait of physician as a fallible human being, then offers a bird’s eye view of all the emotional and psychological disruptions which inevitably follow medical error in the lives of the patient and family, as well as in the professional and private lives of the physician responsible and the larger medical complex. Her book offers a rare glimpse into the dueling perspectives between layman and attorney versus physician and attorney on both sides of this grueling and costly medical malpractice battle.
In our age when thousands of opportunistic lawsuits are causing the most sensitive and erudite physicians to question their continuance in their chosen profession, and when the deliberate omission of errors from medical records disables the profession from learning from its mistakes, this author invites our culture to pursue an alternate model to address medical error, one which though still reactive in nature and necessarily charged with powerful emotion, is nevertheless supportive of everyone involved, a new, responsible and merciful replacement for our current model which fuels the fury of vengeance and legal retaliation. This book is therefore a mediation, a space where anger and scrutiny are safely expressed, and where both physician and patient are simultaneously held to the highest ethical standard.
For all of us who inhabit the world’s stage as either patient or medical professional, Pandemic of Opportunism leads us into a higher morality where this complex issue of medical error is based upon reciprocal understanding and affirmation rather than the desire to mutually and legally destroy.
I applaud this author who courageously revisited her painful trauma with strength, honesty, and eloquent style in order to create for all readers a vivid account of her experience, then apply it to teach transcendental compassion to all who have had, are having, or might of necessity be forced to endure tragedy in their futures. With the depth of empathy and compassion presented in this book, an augmented system of higher intellectual reconciliation is a viable possibility when negligible, serious, and sometimes fatal errors unfortunately occur.