Medical Malpractice Claims and Awards

07 Apr Medical Malpractice Claims and Awards

Medical malpractice lawyers deal with the law as it regards the obligations of doctors to their patients. The law is very specific where the duties of a physician to their patients are concerned. Whenever a physician takes on the patient, they take on an obligation to provide them with competent medical care and with effective treatments. They can also be held liable under the law if they are negligentful by way of a failure to diagnose condition that worsens and results in real harm to their patient.

Failure to diagnose accounts for nearly half of the malpractice claims brought every year. There are specific limits to how much responsibility a physician has to their patient where diagnosing an illness successfully is concerned, however. For instance, if the patient deliberately hides the illness from them, refuses the testing that would’ve revealed the illness or otherwise foils the doctor’s efforts to examine them, the patient cannot really say the doctor failed to diagnose them.

In some cases, doctors are  held liable for negligence when they fail to give effective treatments or when they order treatments that are specifically incorrect for the condition in question. When this happens, the patients sometimes suffer much more than they would have if they had been given an effective treatment in a timely manner. Physician malpractice laws exist to make sure those patients who are harmed by a doctor’s negligence have a legal recourse to recover compensation to help them pay for their medical expenses. These lawsuits oftentimes incorporate pain and suffering into the total amount sought in the jury award. This can be hard to quantify, but an attorney will help you come up with a realistic figure based upon past cases and your particular situation.

There are some things that are definitely not malpractice that people often mistake for physician negligence. For example, there are a lot of patients who call lawyers complaining that the doctor put them at undue risk when nothing actually happened to the patient and, in fact, when the treatment may have proved to be beneficial. Pain, fear and other anxieties are common consequences of effective medical treatments. Being put through this doesn’t necessarily mean that the doctor was negligent. If there bedside manner was lacking, that is another matter entirely from negligence that is not something that they can be sued over in court.