delivered the opinion of the Court.
The commencement of petitioner’s civil treble-damages action under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) was timely only if the so-called “injury and pattern discovery” rule governs the start of the 4-year limitations period. We hold that it does not.
I
In February 1985, petitioner, Mark Rotella, was admitted to the Brookhaven Psychiatric Pavilion with a diagnosis of major depression.
Rotella
v.
Pederson,
*552 RICO, 18 U.S.C. §§ 1961-1968 (1994 ed. and Supp. III), makes it criminal “to conduct” an “enterprise's affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity,” 18 U.S.C. § 1962(e), defined as behavior that violates certain other laws, either enumerated federal statutes or state laws addressing specifiеd topics and bearing specified penalties, 18 U. S. C. § 1961(1) (Supp. III). “Pattern” is also a defined term requiring “at least two acts of racketeering activity ..., the last of which occurred within ten years... after the commission of a prior act of racketeering activity.” 18 U. S. C. § 1961(5).
RICO provides for civil actions (like this one) by which “[a]ny person injured in his business or property” by a RICO violation may seek treble damages and attorney’s fees. 18 U. S. C. § 1964(c) (Supp. III). Rotella alleged such injury, in that respondents had conspired to admit, treat, and retain him at Brookhaven not for any medical reason but simply to maximize their profits. Respondents raised the statute of limitations as a defense and sought summary judgment on the ground that the period for bringing the civil action had expirеd before Rotella sued.
Agency Holding Corp.
v.
Malley-Duff & Associates, Inc.,
> — i H-Í
Given civil RICO’s want of any express limitations provision for civil enforcement actions, in Malley-Duff we undertook to derive one and determined that the limitations period should take no account of differences among the multifarious predicate acts of racketeering activity covered by the statute. Although we chose a uniform 4-year period on a Clayton Act analogy, §4B, as added, 69 Stat. 283, 15 U. S. C. § 15b, we did not decide when the period began to run, and the question has divided the Courts of Appeals.
Three distinct approaches emerged in the wake of
Malley-Duff.
Some Circuits, like the Fifth in this case, applied an injury discovery accrual rule starting the clock when a plaintiff knew or should have known of his injury. See,
e. g., Grimmett
v.
Brown,
Some applied the injury and pattern discovery rule that Rotella seeks, under whiсh a civil RICO claim accrues only when the claimant discovers, or should discover, both an injury and a pattern of RICO activity. See,
e. g., Caproni
v.
Prudential Securities, Inc.,
The Third Circuit applied a “last predicate act” rule, see
Keystone Ins. Co.
v.
Houghton,
In
Klehr
v. A.
O. Smith Corp.,
The decision in Klehr left two candidates favored by various Courts of Appeals: some form of the injury discovery rule (preferred by a majority of Circuits to have considered it), and the injury and pattern discovery rule. Today, guided by principles enunciated in Klehr, we eliminate the latter. 2
*555 h-i HH h — {
We think the minority injury and pattern discovery rule unsound for a number of reasons. We start with the realization that under the prоvision recognizing the possibility of finding a pattern of racketeering in predicate acts 10 years apart, even an injury occurrence rule unsoftened by a discovery feature could in theory open the door to proof of predicate acts occurring 10 years before injury and 14 before commencement of litigation. A pattern discovery rule would allow proof of a defendant’s acts even more remote from time of trial and, hence, litigation even more at odds with the basic policies of all limitations provisions: repose, elimination of stale claims, and certainty about a plaintiff’s opportunity for recovery and a defendant’s potential liabilities. See,
e. g., Klehr, supra,
at 187;
Malley-Duff,
How long is too lоng is, of course, a matter of judgment based on experience, and it gives us great pause that the injury and pattern discovery rule is an extension of the traditional federal accrual rule of injury discovery, and unwarranted by the injury discovery rule’s rationale. Federal courts, to be sure, generally apply a discovery accrual rule when a statute is silent on the issue, as civil RICO is here.
Klehr, supra,
at 191 (citing
Connors
v.
Hallmark & Son Coal Co.,
“We are unconvinced that for statute of limitations purposes a plaintiff’s ignorance of his legal rights and his *556 ignorance of the fact of his injury or its cause should receive identical treatment. That he has been injured in fact may be unknown or unknowable until the injury manifests itself; and the facts about causation may be in the control of the putative defendant, unavailable to the plaintiff or at least very difficult to obtain. The prospect is not so bleak for a plaintiff in possession of the critical facts that he has been hurt and who has inflicted the injury. He is no longer at the mercy of the latter. There are others who can tell him if he has been wronged, and he need only ask.” United States v. Kubrick,444 U. S. 111 , 122 (1979).
A person suffering from inadequate treatment is thus responsible for determining within the limitations period then running whether the inadequacy was malpractice.
We see no good reason for accepting a lesser degree of responsibility on the part of a RICO plaintiff. It is true, of course, as Rotella points out, that RICO has a unique pattern requirement, see
Malley-Duff, supra,
at 154 (“[T]he heart of any RICO complaint is the allegation of a
pattern
of racketeering”);
H. J.
Inc. v.
Northwestern Bell Telephone Co.,
Nor does Rotella’s argument gain strength from the fact that some patterns of racketeering will include fraud, which is generally associated with a different accrual rule; we have already found the connection between civil RICO and fraud to be an insufficient ground for recognizing a limitations period beyond four years, Malley-Duff, supra, at 149, and the lenient rule Rotella seeks would amount to backsliding from Malley-Duff.
What is equally bad is that a less demanding basic discovery rule than federal law generally applies would clash with the limitations imposed on Clayton Act suits. This is important because, as we have previously noted, there is a clеar legislative record of congressional reliance on the Clayton Act when RICO was under consideration, see
Sedima, S. P. R. L.
v.
Imrex Co.,
In sum, any accrual rule softened by a pattern discovery feature would, undercut every single policy we have mentionеd. By tying the start of the limitations period to a plaintiff’s reasonable discovery of a pattern rather than to the point of injury or its reasonable discovery, the rule would extend the potential limitations period for most civil RICO cases well beyond the time when a plaintiff’s cause of action is complete,
4
as this ease shows. Rotella does not deny that
*559
he knew of his injury in 1986 when it occurred, or that his civil RICO claim wаs complete and subject to suit at that time. But under Rotella’s rule, the clock would have started only in 1994, when he discovered the pattern of predicate acts (his assumption being that he could not reasonably have been expected to discover them sooner). A limitations period that would have begun to run only eight years after a claim becamе ripe would bar repose, prove a godsend to stale claims, and doom any hope of certainty in identifying potential liability. Whatever disputes may arise about pinpointing the moment a plaintiff should have discovered an injury to himself would be dwarfed by the controversy inherent in divining when a plaintiff should have discovered a racketeering pattern that might well be complex, concealed or fraudulent, and involve harm to parties wholly unrelated to an injured plaintiff. The fact, as Rotella notes, that difficulty in identifying a pattern is inherent in civil RICO, see
H. J. Inc.,
Rotella has two remaining points about which a word should be said. We have already encountered his аrgument that differences between RICO and the Clayton Act render their analogy inapt, and we have explained why neither the RICO pattern requirement nor the occurrence of fraud in
*560
RICO patterns is a good reason to ignore the Clayton Act model, see
supra,
at 556-557. Here it remains only to respond to Rotella’s argument that we ourselves undercut the force of the Clayton Act analogy when we held that RICO had no racketeering injury requirement comparable to the antitrust injury requirement under the Clayton Act, see
Sedima,
Finally, Rotella returns to his point that RICO patterns will involve fraud in many eases, when he argues that unless a pattern discovery rule is recognized, a RICO plaintiff will sometimes be barred from suit by Federal Rule оf Civil Procedure 9(b), which provides that fraud must be pleaded with particularity. While we will assume that Rule 9(b) will exact some cost, we are wary of allowing speculation about that cost to control the resolution of the issue here. Rotella has presented no case in which Rule 9(b) has effectively barred a claim like his, and he ignores the flexibility provided by Rule 11(b)(3), allоwing pleadings based on evidence reasonably anticipated after further, investigation or discovery. See,
e. g., Corley
v.
Rosewood Care Center,
Inc.
of Peoria,
The judgment of the Court of Appeals is affirmed.
It is so ordered.
Notes
Rotella alleged that “a group of doctors and their related business entities . . . improperly conspir[ed] to admit, treat, and retain him at Brookhaven Psychiatric Pavilion for reasons related to their own financial interests rather than the patient’s psychiatric condition.”
We do not, however, settle upon a final rule. In addition to the possibilities entertained in the Courts of Appeals, Justice Scaiia has espoused an “injury occurrence” rule, under which discovery would be irrelevant,
Klehr
v. A.
O. Smith Corp.,
This objective of encouraging prompt litigation to combat racketeering is the most obvious answer to Rotella’s argument that the injury and pattern discovery rule should be adopted because “RICO is to be read
*558
broadly” and “‘liberally construed to effectuate its remedial purposes,”'
Sedima, S. P. R. L.
v.
Imrex Co.,
Some Circuits apply injury and pattern disсovery out of fear that when the injury precedes a second predicate act, the limitations period might otherwise expire before the pattern is created.
E. g., Granite Falls Bank
v.
Henrikson,
The quandary is hypothetical here; Rotella does not dispute that his injury in 1986 completed the elements of his cause of action. Hence, we *559 need not and do not decide whether civil RICO allows for a cause of action when a second predicate act follows the injury, or what limitations accrual rule might apply in such a case. In any event, doubt about whether a harm might be actionable before a pattern is complete is a weak justification for the cost of a general pattern discovery rule.