Attitude

‘It's your attitude, not your aptitude, that determines your altitude’

From time to time, I carry out medicolegal patient examinations for what might be termed ‘trips and slips’. In these, the patient has had an accident and the injuries involve damage to a tooth or teeth. It is my task to assess the damage, the cost of its repair and how many times the repair may have to be replaced during the patient's expected lifetime. Some knowledge of restoration longevity and, indeed, the patient's potential longevity, is therefore needed. I have, however, recently become surprised by what seems to be an increasing number of people who need a medicolegal examination (and are therefore suing someone) for a relatively minor injury.

In this regard, a patient who I saw recently had been staying at a hotel for what had been planned as a restful weekend with her partner. At dinner on the first evening, she described how she was eating the vegetables which had been served with the meal but felt a ‘crunch’ on her ‘front teeth’, realizing that there was something hard, like a stone, in the vegetables. The patient showed this to a waitress who displayed little empathy and the restaurant guest discovered when she got to a mirror that her two central incisor teeth had been chipped. She was too upset to continue her meal, and asked to speak with the duty manager and make an entry in the hotel incident book, but these requests were declined. The patient and her partner cut short their weekend and contacted a ‘no win no fee’ lawyer at the earliest opportunity. I estimated the cost of the minimal restorations needed to repair the damage at less than £300, with these potentially requiring replacement once during the patient's projected lifetime. It is my contention that, had the hotel manager displayed some sympathy and offered some sort of settlement, and perhaps a large bouquet of flowers, that the patient would never have consulted a lawyer. However, once the legal wheels start rolling, there is little to stop them and the bills keep mounting; in this case, the cost of the medicolegal examination, the charge by the lawyers for photocopying (unnecessarily) the patient's medical records, secretarial time and so forth, all of which is likely to amount to ten, or even twenty, times the amount that the patient will receive. While it is likely and correct that the patient will receive compensation, a substantial amount of costs would have been saved had the attitude of the hotel staff been different.