Did you know that medical malpractice cases are among the most difficult personal injury cases? You wouldn’t think so if your experience with medical malpractice is limited to what you’ve seen in the media or in the movies. If you believe what you see on television, medical malpractice cases are a source of enormous settlements for even small or insignificant injuries. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, medical malpractice cases can take years, cost the claimant tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and are, in even the clearest and most egregious cases, tenaciously defended by doctors and their insurers.

In any medical malpractice case, the most important factors are liability and damages. Some medical provider has to be liable for what happened, and you must have suffered damages. Due to the high cost and length of time involved in medical malpractice cases, we only handle cases where the medical mistake results in significant damages to the patient.

What makes a doctor liable for a mistake? A starting point is a concept called standard of care. The standard of care is the degree of caution required of an individual (a doctor, for example) who is under a duty of care. The duty of care is comes automatically from a doctor’s decision to treat a patient. The standard of care depends, however, on the circumstances. A physician is only held to the standard of a reasonably prudent physician in his or her own specialty. So, if a doctor misdiagnoses an illness, neglects to treat an illness, or mistreats an illness, the doctor may have violated the applicable standard of care. By the same token, a doctor can commit medical malpractice by failing to obtain from a patient informed consent prior to a procedure. Informed consent comes from a patient only when the patient has been adequately informed as to the risks of a procedure or treatment. However, doctors are not required to promise their patients good results for procedures. Just because you did not get better following a procedure or treatment does not mean that you necessarily have a medical malpractice case.

Standard of care is not something that just anyone can establish. A medical malpractice victim must bear the burden of presenting expert testimony that a physician has breached the standard of care. Think about that for a minute. A local surgeon commits a clear case of medical malpractice and you are left injured. In order to recover, you are going to have to hire another doctor in the same field or specialty as the negligent doctor to come to court and testify that his colleague committed medical malpractice. With all of the misunderstandings and excitement in the media about medical malpractice do you think any local doctor is going to want to testify against another one? If you can find such a doctor, do you think it will be cheap? If you are beginning to suspect that medical malpractice is not the source of large, easy settlements that others would have you believe, you are beginning to understand why you should only contact an attorney that has the experience and skills to handle such a case. You need an attorney that understands the costs and benefits of medical malpractice cases, and has successfully handled such cases.

If you’ve read the material above, and you still think that you might have a medical malpractice claim, please CONTACT US.