Friday, March 25, 2011

Ball Park Amnesty

I just had the opportunity to go to a professional Spring training baseball game. On the ticket and also announced in the stadium was the statement that "Baseball is an inherently dangerous sport and baseball, bats and other objects may cause injury, the stadium, team or its employees are not responsible for any injuries that must occur." By entering, you assume all liability for any injury. So, in other words, if a highly trained professional accidentally slips and lets hits bat fly into the crowd, he is not held responsible. I kept thinking about this. Medicine is an inherently dangerous activity, perhaps we need Ball park Amnesty! If a surgeon has an accident, he is sued. Oh, wait a minute. We cant have accidents, only malpractice.

3 comments:

rnraquel said...

I have always wanted to go to spring training! What team did you see? I want to go see the Red Sox, but have had several patients tell me that their ballpark is not nice and the traffic is terrible. Of course these were grouchy sick snowbirds, so perhaps they wouldn't like much of anything.
By the way, I think the idea of "hospital amnesty" sounds pretty good.

SeaSpray said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
SeaSpray said...

Cool Throckmorton! Must've been a lot of fun! :)

Mr SeaSpray's side of the family and younger son are avid baseball fans - die hard Yankee fans. His great uncle was a pitcher on the Yankees years ago. He was friends with Babe Ruth and brought him up to our county to hunt and fish.

RNraquel - we'd be competing in cheering our teams on for sure. :)

Oh Throckmorton ...if only a doc's perfect world sans wrongful law suits dream could come true ...

It seems everything ..and every place has a disclaimer about risk of injury.

Next thing will be they are reading a disclaimer about life ..stating that LIFE is filled with "inherently dangerous activity" to babies traveling down the birth canal.

Sometimes it would be nice NOT to be reminded of all the bad things that will probably never happen.

Question: Why do hospitals have patients sign stating consent they are not responsible for anything going wrong and pt agrees to take the risk ..when they can still be sued if something goes wrong? I realize they have to have consent. But beyond that ..they put all these horrid risks in there to absolve of responsibility. Seems to be a moot point since they can still be sued.