Sepsis – Discharging a Loaded Term

Countless doctors on countless medical TV dramas have looked mournfully at each other and intoned with a doomsday knell over a patient’s head: “It’s sepsis.  There’s nothing we can do.”  With that in mind, it’s hard to blame the typical American juror who, from what we have heard during focus groups, believes sepsis is scary and virtually always deadly.

Among the many unhelpful juror predispositions we encounter during our research and consulting work for medical malpractice cases is a widespread belief that sepsis is always a life-threatening emergency that requires immediate hospitalization, opening the door to claims caregivers should have “done more” and taken a patient’s sepsis more seriously.

Given this superficial perception, it’s clear that sepsis is a classic example of a loaded term.  It has a literal definition, but carries so much baggage the actual meaning gets eclipsed.  The association with “septic systems” doesn’t help, and Roget’s Thesaurus provides ominous synonyms such as “pestilential,” “deadly,” “virulent” and “toxic.”

The challenge, then, is moving past these associations to the true meaning of the term and its nuances.

The actual definition of sepsis (according to the American College of Chest Physicians and the Society of Critical Care Medicine) is an inflammatory response involving elevation of two or more of the following – heart rate, temperature, white blood cell count or respiratory rate – plus an infection.  This means that people – including your jurors – regularly walk around “septic” but don’t know it and actually get better on their own without any treatment.  The frequent plaintiff contention that sepsis is automatically an emergency requiring hospitalization simply isn't true.

Of course, plaintiff lawyers are all too happy to blur these lines and lump the more mundane sepsis in with its life-threatening cousins, severe sepsis and septic shock.  It’s your job to educate jurors what sepsis actually means – simply a common inflammatory response to an infection – and contrast that with the more serious forms, then repeat and reinforce that distinction throughout trial.

From our perspective, repetition is key to overcoming the negative associations of loaded terms.  The more you repeat something to jurors, the more likely it is to penetrate and lodge in their brains. By the end of trial, you might be surprised to find jurors saying of course sepsis doesn’t always require hospitalization or aggressive treatment.

If you have a case in which you need to overcome the negative connotations of sepsis or other loaded terms, we’d be happy to help.  Please contact Senior Vice President Claire Luna at 714-754-1010 or cluna@juryimpact.net to find out our perspective on your case.