Our pal Ivan Oransky at Retraction Watch, who’s also the VP of MedPage Today, alerted us to a terrific MedPage Today video about how and why doctors should apologize. It’s not embeddable, but you can watch it here.

You should probably apologize if you perform a hair transplant with a pizza cutter.[/caption]

A summary of the key points:

Two out of 10 malpractice claims arise as a result of poor communication between doctors and patients. When doctors own up to what happened and apologize, patients are less likely to sue.

Eric Thomas, MD, PhD, a professor of internal medicine at the UT Health Science Center in Houston, talks about research into medical apologies, then adds:

Here in the University of Texas system, we have seen a reduction in claims since we have trained our clinicians in how to have these conversations and encouraged them to disclose and apologize. And importantly, medical malpractice insurers are now encouraging their insured physicians to apologize and tell patients about why things went wrong and offer compensation even outside the court system. So it’s pretty clear now that it’s not only the right thing to do, but it does reduce claims.

(Yup. As Atul Gawande wrote in Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, “Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.”)

Chatón T. Turner, Associate Counsel at the UPMC/University of Pittsburgh Medical Center continues:

There was a lot of work done by a lot of well-intentioned lawyers for a while to try to convince doctors that instead of apologizing and being transparent, they should be more defensive and think of their own self-interest. Not only was that strategy in conflict with the physician’s ethics, it also was contrary to how most people like to be treated, right? It’s much easier to sue people you don’t like than it is to sue people with whom you have good relationships. And so what the literature shows is that when physicians are honest with patients, when they actually give them thoughtful apologies and explanations about what happened, it tends to de-escalate the anger and the animus that the patients have with them, and allow them to have real dialogue about what happened.

Sadly, the piece ends with a demoralizing step backward, with health system’s Chief Risk Officer offering a “word of caution” that apology shouldn’t involve any admission of wrongdoing. “You don’t want to admit that you’ve been the cause of that situation,” she says, essentially contradicting the four previous speakers. Also contradicting the philosophy of our old friend Maimonides, who once said, “The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it.”