Former doctor Dr. Patricia Engel is an attorney for medical liability law specializing in medicine. Two new cases once again call for Patricia’s professional expertise and human empathy.
Following a sports accident Jan Maywald is paralyzed from the neck down and is receiving hospital treatment. Jan copes with his fate with humor and a healthy dose of irony. A smart guy with a keen wit, he is often in better spirits than those treating him. Jan wants to discharge himself from the clinic at his own risk, but his doctors deny him this right. So he asks Patricia Engel to represent his interests. At first Patricia doesn’t understand where the problem lies – Jan can discharge himself at his own risk any time he likes. However, acting on the advice of his doctors, his wife has applied for a patient care order. He needs legal assistance in order to prevent the application being granted. Patricia’s decision to take on the case is complicated by the fact that the doctor in charge is Prof. Brenner, her father. And it’s not long before the dedicated attorney realizes that there’s more to this case than first meets the eye, because Jan has other motivations he initially withholds from her.
In the second case Patricia Engel is representing the Reuters. On the instruction of her long-time family doctor, Susanne Reuter was admitted to the Streiter Clinic where she had to undergo a complicated operation. Patricia Engel wonders why Mrs. Reuter was admitted to the Streiter Clinic, especially as Dr. Streiter is not a recognized specialist for this kind of operation. While researching the case, she comes across other patients who have been treated at Streiter’s clinic and are still suffering from the after-effects. The list also includes a number of deaths. The suspicion that treatments carried out by incompetent doctors might have been the cause becomes more likely. The clinic’s medical director Dr. Magnus Streiter turns out to be an arrogant “demigod in white”, who is solely focused on one thing: revenue and profit maximization for his clinic. To achieve this, he pays head money to family doctors, emergency doctors and paramedics who refer patients to his clinic.
