While the financial costs of our broken medical liability system are sky-high – estimated anywhere between $55 billion and $210 billion per year – the social and emotional costs on physicians and patients are not always as easy to quantify, but just as important nonetheless.

In a recent post on the New York Times blog Well, Dr. Pauline Chen provides a glimpse at how a lawsuit affects a physician, and in turn, his or her patients.

After Dr. Chen was named in a lawsuit that was eventually dropped, she began defensively practicing medicine.