Published 12 November 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b4661
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b4661

Views & Reviews

In and Out of Hospital

Joking about cerebral palsy

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

When you’re an obstetrician cerebral palsy is never far from your thoughts. A brain damaged baby means years of suffering for patient and family and a field day for lawyers, though most cases have nothing to do with events in labour.

When you retire you try to put these things behind you, though the chance of a lawsuit will still be around for another 25 years. Invitations to meetings won’t, however, and are hard to resist. Recently I spent two days in Dublin chairing a conference on cerebral palsy "from conception to birth and beyond."

At the start it looked like a tricky assignment. The front row was full of solicitors. After the first talk, each raised a hand to ask a penetrating question. I relaxed slightly when the speaker addressed them by their first names.

But the organisers had ensured that the programme would transcend legal issues. There were . . . [Full text of this article]

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