Ohio AAJ official disputes doctors' claims on "defensive medicine" testing.

In a letter to the editors of the Columbus (OH) Dispatch (3/3, DeRose), the president-elect of the Ohio Association for Justice takes issue with an earlier article highlighting studies in which nearly all doctors said responding to surveys said medical tests, referrals or admissions were ordered to protect against malpractice lawsuits. He argued that the real crisis in medicine is "medical errors, and errors ought to be the primary concern of the medical community, not the declining number of lawsuits against hospitals and doctors when those preventable errors occur." He also disputes doctors' self-reports of unneeded testing, arguing that the law does not require any testing beyond what is reasonable for patient care, and noting that under Ohio law malpractice lawsuits require a sworn affidavit from another physician in the same specialty that treatment was unreasonable