This presentation describes the faith-building experience it was for the speaker to go through a wrongful death lawsuit with his friend and with God.

AMEN 2020 Virtual Conference – Touch of Faith

<p>This presentation describes the faith-building experience it was for the speaker to go through a wrongful death lawsuit with his friend and with God.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Adventist Medical Evangelism Network (AMEN)

Plenary Session

Brian Schwartz

The Healing Touch of Faith

Zeno Charles-Marcel

Spirituality, Religion, and Health: Making Faith Touchable

Roger Seheult

COVID-19: The Role of the Medical Evangelist

Lyndi Schwartz

Food as Medicine

Andi Hunsaker

Giorgia Maghelli

The Power of an Introduction

Harvey Hahn

Expert Witness?

Ted N.C. Wilson

The Touch of Faith: Take Up Your Bed and Walk

Milan Moskala

International Reports

Mark Finley

A Touch of Faith

Dear Lord, thank you so much that we can gather together physically and virtually.

I know that this talk has actually been pre-planned, I've written it out, but please let me be able to reach people where they are and give people what they need, not what I need, dear Lord.

I just wanna say that Brian Schwartz and I just went through a 4 year, 5000000 dollar wrongful death lawsuit.

Hopefully that's gonna get your guys' attention.

So, Brian already gave the background that we're actually at an AMEN conference, so I'm going to go past that and go to my first slide here.

Okay, so 2020, It's been kind of an interesting year.

I don't know how many people are crying out there or laughing, but a lot of crazy stuff has gone on.

Now, we've all struggled through this, we've all been hurt through this, we've all suffered.

And a lot of times it's really hard to kind of see why we've gone through all this stuff.

But this talk is really about building faith and it's about being able to look behind in retrospect, in hindsight, and seeing in 2020 why God put us through all these different things here.

All right, now this is kind of a sensitive topic, but this is a totally HIPAA compliant talk.

That's actually a joke for the medical people in the audience.

All right, I'm not going to discuss any particulars of the case, but I could.

Since we were sued, everything is in the public record, but this really isn't an educational talk about medical legal issues.

This is a talk about how this built my faith.

This verse has really helped me through this whole process here.

Lord, you're my God, I will exalt you and praise your name, for in your perfect faithfulness, not ours, you have done wonderful things planned long ago.

When you see this talk, you're going to see that God had preplanned things years in advance.

And what I want everyone to kind of start looking at their own life is when you start looking back and you start seeing God's hands in things, you realize God's hands in everything in our lives.

So Brian and I are both cardiologists and we deal with death all the time.

Cardiovascular disease is the number 1 cause of death in the United States.

Does anyone know what picture this is of a painting?

This is Johnny Made Whole by Nathan Green and I have this in my office.

And the reason I love it is because it's maybe hard to see, but Johnny's a kid getting out of a wheelchair in heaven.

In heaven there's gonna be no more tears, no more death, no more crying.

Basically it's gonna be awesome when we're all out of business, especially you dentists.

Caused a lot of pain, but you're still my friends.

Now, The next worst thing to having a patient die is being sued.

If you look at the data, basically for every 20 years of practice, there's probably 1 lawsuit.

If you're a surgeon or a proceduralist, it's about 1 in every 10 years.

So mathematically, Brian and I were probably at the time to get sued here.

Now the 1 thing that doctors do is we can't be perfect.

We kind of risk assess, we understand probabilities, we try to do the best possible care based on the changing evidence, kind of local expertise, and also what the patient wants.

But it's actually a huge responsibility to kind of take that upon ourselves to try to care for other people's health and lives.

Now in this case, I was taking care of a high-profile executive at Kettering, and I was asked to assess the patient's perioperative risk for upcoming surgery.

Now, Brian got dragged into this because they asked me to do an angiogram on him just in case he needed a stent.

As the trial kept going on, Brian told me, I'm not going to do you any more favors, man.

Now it's impossible to predict the future.

What did we think we were going to be doing a year ago?

We had all these plans to travel, go places, do stuff, have a real AIMEN meeting, and it's not happening.

Same thing, doctors have a hard time predicting the future.

What we do best is say, this is the probability, this is your risk, and then talk to the patients and let them know what those risks are.

Now unfortunately, the patient died after a series of complications in the operating room and then passed away.

As Brian and I mentioned, we were down at the HealthNet AIMED meeting when this happened.

As soon as my partner called me that morning, I called the wife, said how sorry I was, how shocked I was.

But the strange thing was, like I said, we weren't in the hospital, We weren't even in the city, we weren't even in the state.

But while we were gone, I think because he was such a high profile patient, people started kind of running for cover, and then the blame machine had already begun.

And since Brian and I were not in town, it kind of rolled down to our level here.

Now, has anyone heard of something called Project Candor?

1 is how to teach the medical staff to give bad news to the patient and family.

But a smaller subset of that is there's a no-fault payment that's often given to the family to help the family out, and part of the idea is to prevent future lawsuits.

So, the administration talked to Brian and I and said, would you guys be willing to agree to give a no-fault payment to help the family out.

And Brian and I said, yeah, because we want to help the family.

I know the kid in the family, so we wanted to support those people.

Now, in retrospect, that was probably a mistake.

When we told this to our lawyer, what Project Candor was, we had a couple responses.

So our lawyer goes, that's crazy, because you're almost admitting guilt.

We told this to our other lawyer, and he was like, that's about the dumbest idea I've ever heard.

And both these guys are lawyers, they both admitted they're kind of jaded, but they thought that wasn't a good idea.

Now what was really interesting about this is there's an anesthesiologist, the surgeon that did the case, and 2 cardiologists.

The only people that were involved in the CANDOR part of this settlement was Brian and I.

The other thing is even before we were asked to weigh in on this CANDOR part, they had already sent the case out for external review, which is pretty common.

But the only review they sent it out for was for cardiac review.

So there was no surgical review, no anesthesiology review.

Basically, most people thought that there was a problem with the cardiology part of this case from the get-go.

So in this slide, you kind of see that kind of in life, a lot of times things are kind of stacking up on you.

Oh, there's another thing I forgot to mention.

We're not sure of this, but we're pretty sure someone in administration was leaking details of the case back to the family.

So we were being totally compromised from the word go.

In fact, 1 of their expert witnesses was 1 of the external case reviewers that Kettering used.

So that cardiologist had access to all internal documents, all internal communication, knew everything about the case.

So we thought that we're really behind the April on here.

Now the crazy thing here is that you kind of feel like in this slide they're just holding up the world but what you have to realize here is that God can do more in His 1 little finger than we can do with all of our efforts.

The 1 thing we need to do is stop working on things so hard and just get down on our knees and start praying.

That would save a whole bunch of more time.

For another example, this is me at Hocking hills, basically trying to hold up the world.

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Series

Plenary Session

Expert Witness?

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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Reasons for Hope: The Case for Faith in a Secular Age - Part 4

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