Malpractice and Heroism

06 Mar Malpractice and Heroism

Imagine that you had a job as an accountant. At your job, you prepared people's taxes, went over people's books to make sure that they were accurate and did other tasks to make people's lives a bit easier and to keep their books a bit more accurate. If you failed to catch an incredibly complex act of embezzling that would've required specialized legal training to even recognize, do you think you would be liable for having been negligent? Probably not. The same thing applies to your doctor. If you want to understand medical malpractice, you have to understand the concept of reasonable expectations.

Skilled and Competent

Doctors have specific obligations to their patients. Among these obligations is the providing of competent care. Competent care does not mean heroic care. There are some situations where no doctor could help the patient. If somebody comes in with internal bleeding in the wrong place, an infection that has been let go for too long or cancer that is at its third or fourth stage, there's a good chance that that patient is going to die no matter what a doctor does. A doctor is obligated to be reasonably careful and reasonably skillful in the execution of their duties to their patients. They are not obligated to perform like the doctors on TV shows who always know the cure for everything and who always manage to save their patients. Simply put, life doesn't always turn out this way.

Attentive and Honest

Some treatments come with tremendous risks. Chemotherapy, for instance, will make you sick, could potentially do real harm to your body that is irreversible and, depending upon a patient's overall health, may actually be deadly. A competent, attentive and honest physician will make sure you understand all of the risks involved before they start any treatment. The physician is not responsible, however, for your deciding to take on a risky treatment. That decision is always yours. The physician cannot be responsible for some treatments happening to be dangerous, either. Chemotherapy may not be the best solution in the world but, for the moment, it's the only option that a lot of people have and that means taking real risks.

Physician negligence is not the same thing as being unable to overcome the odds stacked against a patient. A medical malpractice attorney can help you to understand whether or not a malpractice claim you're considering is based in reason or a misunderstanding of what malpractice law covers.