WASHINGTON

IT’S BAD ENOUGH when plaintiffs’ lawyers unlawfully pay clients to serve as props in speculative shareholder litigation, bribe judges or conspire to present fraudulent medical evidence in thousands of lawsuits that crowd court dockets and delay justice for those with legitimate health claims.

But now there’s evidence that personal-injury lawyers’ brazenly deceptive online trolling for new clients is putting the health of Americans at risk. Lives are at stake, and Congress and state bar associations should act.

A recently published report from the New York-based Center for Medicine in the Public Interest demonstrates that many Americans are routinely misled when conducting Internet searches about illnesses or medical conditions from which they or loved ones suffer.

CMPI says its analysis revealed that Internet search results are “dominated by Web sites paid for and sponsored by either class-action law firms or legal-marketing sites searching for plaintiff referrals.”

Robert Goldberg, CMPI vice president and co-author of the report, said, “What we found was not only disturbing, but dangerous to public health.” Millions of Americans now resort to Google searches more readily than consultations with the family physician, he explained. “People trust, and make decisions, based on information they find online.”

But with few exceptions, Goldberg added, the information that he and colleagues found online “had no medical authority whatsoever. In many cases, we found lawyers posing as medical experts.”

In fact, the tort lawyers’ masquerading Web sites are shamelessly designed to gin up clients for speculative litigation. Rather than getting unbiased, scientifically sound information, visitors to these sites unknowingly get skewed, misleading information that hypes risks, ignores benefits and can actually frighten them away from life-saving drugs or treatments.

Typically such Web sites eventually lead visitors to a page that ominously suggests, “If you’ve taken Drug X, you may be at considerable risk for Side Effect Y, and you may have grounds for a lawsuit.”

Among four telling case studies, the CMPI report cites an article based on “questionable methodologies” and a biased editorial that were published together in the New England Journal of Medicine in May 2007, making unfounded allegations that use of the Food and Drug Administration-approved and widely prescribed diabetes drug Avandia could lead to cardiovascular disease. According to the report, media stories and Internet postings quickly proliferated, as did trial-lawyer efforts to drive litigation against the drug’s maker.

“Despite all of the scientific evidence that demonstrates Avandia effectively treats diabetes, patients may choose not to take the medication based on the information they find online, even though the benefits of the medication far outweigh the risks,” the CMPI report warns.

A recent Merrill Lynch analysis also concluded that “some patients appear to have simply been scared off . . . Avandia” and “alternative oral medications.” Of course, diabetes comprises a growing epidemic in America and, if untreated, can lead to blindness, even loss of limbs.

Blithely ironic or just ruthlessly efficient, personal-injury lawyers have also targeted the beneficial anti-psychotic Zyprexa for allegedly increasing the risk of — diabetes.

CMPI’s report doesn’t cover Zyprexa but, in a survey reported by the Associated Press in June 2007, more than half of 402 randomly surveyed psychiatrists who treat patients with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia indicated that some of those patients stopped taking the drug or reduced their dosage upon seeing lawyers’ advertisements. So, in its drive to file ever more groundless lawsuits, the tort bar has put the mental health of a particularly vulnerable universe of patients at considerable risk.

And in what may constitute the most egregious example of trial-lawyer selfishness, the very lives of another vulnerable universe of patients, young people taking antidepressants, have also been jeopardized.

The CMPI report details how baseless allegations linking certain antidepressants to increased risks of suicide in young people appear to have taken a heartbreaking toll. Negative coverage online and in traditional media resulted in “a sharp decrease in antidepressant prescriptions” as families resisted such prescriptions for their youngsters and, fearing litigation, doctors stopped writing them.

“At the same time,” the report observes, “there was an increase in depression and suicide.”

But rather than acknowledge a problem and lead her membership in a voluntary embrace of transparency and accountability, Kathleen Flynn Peterson, president of the tort bar’s American Association for Justice, has instead attacked CMPI’s report, calling it “laughable at best” and saying its “dubious methodology consists of nothing but Google searches.”

Since the report is primarily about Google searches, Peterson is willfully avoiding its point, leaving to state bar associations the responsibility for ending lawyers’ inherently misleading client recruitment. Minimally, all lawyers should be required to identify themselves clearly and conspicuously on Web sites they sponsor. And since there’s nothing “laughable” about risks to public health, Congress should commence appropriate oversight, too.

Sherman Joyce and Victor Schwartz are, respectively, president and general counsel of the Washington, D.C.-based American Tort Reform Association. Both are lawyers.