Military personnel and their families often can do nothing when victimized by the military's health care system.

Myrna J. Keith wants justice, but she can't get it.

Her 25-year-old son died after he went to a military clinic and got nine times the dosage of a drug ordered by the doctor.

The only physician on duty that day had just completed his internship, had no medical license and had just arrived at the clinic the month before.

Myrna Keith of Eldred, Pa., tends the grave of her son, SPC Scott Wesley Keith, who died of a prescribed drug overdose at an Army base in Germany in 1988. (Skip Peterson/Dayton Daily News).

The head nurse was not certified in advanced life-support techniques, and an essential piece of emergency equipment was missing a part. Other emergency equipment at the clinic was outdated, unsterilized or in a basement.

These circumstances would be powerful weapons in a wrongful-death suit.

But Myrna Keith didn't file a legal action. She couldn't. Her son was active-duty military, and a 47-year-old Supreme Court ruling called the Feres doctrine, along with subsequent cases applying it, bars lawsuits over medical malpractice to active-duty service personnel.

The Feres doctrine is not the only protection given to the military's nearly 600 hospitals and clinics and to the 147,000 people working in them. A variety of laws shields them.

The Military Claims Act, enacted in 1943, prevents even civilians--spouses and children of military personnel--from taking the government to court if the malpractice occurs overseas, where nearly a quarter of a million military dependants live.

The Feres doctrine and the Military Claims Act together bar 1.7 million people from being able to sue for medical malpractice.

"They go to cut off your right leg and they cut off your left leg, and there is nothing you can do about it," said Anne E. Brown, a St. Paul, Minn., attorney who specializes in suing the military for medical malpractice.

Even in cases in which civilian dependents can sue, they must file against the U.S. government, and they're not allowed to name doctors as defendants.

These laws and legal practices, adopted during and shortly after World War II, were designed not to interfere with the military's ability to win wars. But in a peacetime military, these protections more often extend to actions unrelated to military service.

The military is not unaware of the benefits these protections give doctors.

"As military officers and federal employees, one of the benefits we enjoy is the relative freedom from being sued personally as a result of job performance," a Navy commander wrote in a 1994 military medical journal. "In this litigious society, that is no small thing."

Medical malpractice lawsuits, and the threat of them, represent one of the most important factors protecting civilians from death and injury at the hands of the doctors. The reason is simple:

Malpractice insurers charge higher premiums to doctors who lose lawsuits. Malpractice judgments in some states must be reported to medical boards, and malpractice payments are logged on a national database used by medical boards and potential employers to screen problem doctors.

At least two states, Florida and Massachusetts, even make certain information on malpractice judgments available to the public.

"It is plain and apparent to people who are dealing in the system all the time like I do that it's the deterrent effect--it's the threat--of being sued that is the cause of better medicine in the private sector," said William T. Wood, a Rockville, Md., attorney who specializes in medical malpractice cases.

Pentagon officials, in a written statement, said the threat of lawsuits doesn't affect the way military doctors provide care.

"It is not logical or reasonable to think military physicians would provide health care differently for the population that can sue than for the one that cannot sue," the officials said.

Though active-duty service members cannot sue in court and win settlements for their injuries, the officials said, they can get financial assistance and free medical care from the Department of Veterans Affairs.