Key point here. Medicine isn't an exact science and never will be. I'm shocked at some of the unrealistic beliefs people have about medical situations. Every surgery has the risk of death, from heart surgery to foot surgery. Doesn't mean that something was always done in a neglectful manner.
Yes, things happen. Sometimes the doctor messes up, sometimes the patient lies or omits things or doesn't follow orders, and sometimes the statistics just work against you.
and sometimes doctors have agendas. we have a local pediatrician here that a lot of parents refuse to see due to his views on how to treat illness. He is a proponent of the less intervention the better - ie no antibiotics for ear infections, no pain meds, no strep tests, getting him to do anything is like pulling teeth. I've gotten into the habit of calling the pediatricians office before we go to the emergency after hours clinic just to make sure he isn't the doctor on duty. If he is, we go to the er or the urgent care instead.
Unfortunately, when my son had pneumonia he was the emergency call doctor at the clinic that day and my husband didn't have enough experience with the ped's office to know to avoid him so he ended up in charge of my son's treatment in the hospital. My son was hospitalized for 3 days with no visible improvement even though this dr was telling us that everything was fine,he'd probably be discharging him the next day, he was just overreacting when he said he was in pain (this kid has an obscenely high pain tolerance, if he says something hurts we listen), etc.
On the third morning he was sent for his normal morning xray. Usually the technician came and got him, did the xray, then took him back to his room immediately after. This morning, the technician told us to wait because the doctor needed to see the results NOW and he didn't want even the 10 minute delay of taking us back to the room.
5 minutes after we got back to the room the dr came sauntering in and said he thought he'd send us over to the big Childrens Hospital 2 hours away because he wanted them to take a look and make sure things were improving like he said. No big deal, they'd probably look at him and send him home. So we transfer by ambulance to the new hospital.
At the new hospital, we are met at the door by an intern who basically says the same thing--Dr. x wants us to take a look and make sure we don't see anything, we'll probably just send him on home...etc. I don't know what he told her. She listened to his lungs, listened again, and again...then turns white and says "I'm going to get my supervising doctor, this is beyond what I can handle and I'm not comfortable with it." The supervising dr listens, orders an x-ray, and within 30 minutes he is in ICU. What the x-ray technician had seen was that one lung was completely full of fluid (no breath sounds at all on that side) and the other was starting to fill as well. When they tried to lay him flat on the bed for the xray he literally turned blue.
Did the original doctor make a mistake? I don't know - I'm more inclined to think that he was trying his usual tactic of the less treatment the better and when it became obvious that it wasn't going to work (I think the radiologist called him out on it) he passed it off to someone else instead of changing the way he normally did things. Either way, he lied. Based on what the other doctors told us and their obvious surprise at the condition my son was in when we got there, he lied to them as well.