Medical Malpractice Claim Basics

27 Mar Medical Malpractice Claim Basics

Filing a medical malpractice claim can be intimidating. After all, you’re going up against experts in the healthcare field and, as anyone who’s ever dealt with such professionals understands, they can oftentimes make you feel like your opinion isn’t worth much compared to theirs. This is why hiring medical malpractice lawyers is a must. If you’ve been the victim of medical practice at the hands of a medical practitioner, having the facts is crucial to proving the harm done to you and winning your case. With the help of Radiology Scan Expert Witness services, you can get any radiology scan professionally analyzed and used to form an expert opinion on your behalf during legal proceedings. Where negligence is concerned, however, the issue is not medical expertise. Negligence has to do with living up to the reasonable expectations placed upon people in given situations.

To understand the basics of medical malpractice, it’s useful to break it down to its most easily understood elements.

• A doctor took you on as a patient
• The doctor did not live up to their duty to you as your physician
• You were harmed

For most medical malpractice claims, this is the most basic way to understand the sequence of events. When a physician takes you on as a patient, they take on a duty to provide you with competent medical care. Understand that competent is not the same thing as effective. There are instances where patients show up and where they are given top-notch medical care but where their conditions have gone so far that there is no going back and where the patient ends up either suffering or actually dies as a result of their disease or their injuries. Sometimes, even the best physicians in the world can do nothing to stop this.

There are plenty of instances, however, where patients end up being injured by physicians. For instance, patients who come in with complaints of pain in vital areas of their body and are dismissed without being examined and later end up finding out that they have significant injuries sometimes end up suing for malpractice because an earlier diagnosis may have lessened the impact of the injury. Here are some other things that should give you reason to consider contacting a medical malpractice attorney.

• A physician gave you the wrong medication and you were harmed
• A physician failed to diagnose a serious illness and you were harmed
• You contracted an infection due to a dirty healthcare facility
• A condition you suffer was exacerbated due to incorrect medical care
• Someone in your family perished as a result of medical negligence

In some cases, the jury awards for physician negligence add up being quite large. Most of the time, this is because the plaintiff suffered a great deal or because the negligence was so egregious that it ended up costing someone their life.