Medical Malpractice Lawyers
We trust our lives to doctors, surgeons, nurses, and other medical professionals. While most healthcare providers perform their job to the highest standards, medical errors unfortunately happen at an alarming rate. According to a recent study, medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States. That does not take into account the thousands more people who are injured by medical errors every year. When someone is injured by a medical error, they need the help of a knowledgeable and experienced medical malpractice lawyer.
Medical malpractice cases can be some of the most complex and costly cases to litigate. That’s because medical malpractice cases involve the errors of doctors, nurses, and other medical staff or hospitals and other healthcare facilities. The issues are intricate and almost always involve the hiring of expert witnesses to prove that medical errors were made along with the collection of hundreds if not thousands of medical records and other documents. State laws also complicate medical malpractice cases. The best medical malpractice lawyers will help ease the stress and anxiety of dealing with the aftermath of a medical error and fight to obtain the compensation their client deserves.
If you’ve been injured by a medical error in West Virginia, Ohio, or Pennsylvania, call GKT to speak with a medical malpractice lawyer today. Consultations are always free and we never collect a fee unless we win your medical malpractice case. Our medical malpractice lawyers are always available at any time by calling (304) 845-9750, by Live Chat 24/7 at GKT.com, or online.
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What is Medical Malpractice?
Medical malpractice occurs when a doctor, surgeon, nurse, or other medical staff fails to perform their duties to medically-accepted standards of care and causes an injury or death. Medical malpractice can involve a doctor’s wrongful action or the failure of a doctor to take an action. Oftentimes, a doctor or other healthcare provider’s actions or inactions are judged by what another doctor would have done under the same circumstances. Thus, for the purposes of keeping things simple, medical error is a good way of describing medical malpractice.
Common Medical Malpractice Examples
Medical malpractice can take the form of any number of actions or inactions by a health care provider or facility. While it would be impossible to provide every conceivable medical malpractice circumstance, below are some of the more common medical errors leading to a medical malpractice lawsuit.
Failure to Diagnose, Misdiagnosis, or Delayed Diagnosis
Perhaps the most common form of medical error is when a doctor or other healthcare provider fails to provide the correct diagnosis or provides the wrong diagnosis. When a doctor provides the wrong diagnosis, the patient may receive medical treatment that is unnecessary and even harmful, while treatments that could address the correct diagnosis aren’t provided.
Medical issues that are commonly misdiagnosed may include:
- Stroke (acute cerebral vascular incident or subarachnoid hemorrhage)
- Heart attack (myocardial infarction)
- Spinal epidural abscess
- Blood clot in lungs (pulmonary embolism)
- Flesh-eating disease (necrotizing fasciitis)
- Meningitis (bacterial and viral)
- Testicular torsion
- Blood infection (septicemia)
- Lung cancer
- Broken bones
- Appendicitis
While these are some of the more common medical errors regarding failure to diagnose or misdiagnosis, any medical condition can be misdiagnosed, including serious diseases such as cancer.
It’s not always clear whether a doctor or other healthcare provider failed to provide a correct diagnosis. Failure to diagnose amy also include failure to establish a differential diagnosis, failure to order diagnostic tests, failure to address normal findings, failure to consider available clinical information. An experienced medical malpractice lawyer can help determine whether a doctor made a medical error by failing to properly diagnose a disease or other medical condition.
Anesthesia Errors
Anesthesia errors occur when an anesthesiologist makes an error when administering or failing to administer anesthesia. Anesthesia errors are one of the more common forms of medical malpractice and may include the following:
- Administering the wrong anesthesia
- Administering the wrong amount of anesthesia (both too much anesthesia or too little anesthesia)
- Failing to properly monitor a patient under anesthesia
- Failing to properly administer anesthesia
When an anesthesiologist makes a medical error, it can be tragic and result in a wrongful death case. Even when an anesthesia error does not result in death, it can result in a condition referred to as intraoperative awareness. A patient experiencing intraoperative awareness may be mentally conscious during a surgery but unable to move. Thus, they will be mentally “awake” and experience the surgery and have lasting memory of it. Patients who have experienced intraoperative awareness often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD.
Surgical Errors
Surgical errors are errors made by a surgeon during the course of a surgery. These types of medical errors can take many forms, the most common of which are below:
Foreign objects left inside the body
Sometimes surgeons leave foreign medical objects inside the body. These may include clamps, scalpels, knives, blades, pins, needles, tubes, bulbs, sponges, tweezers, forceps, and a variety of other surgical tools. When left inside the body, these foreign objects can cause serious and sometimes life-threatening infections or damage organs and other tissue.
Cuts and Nicks
Surgeries are very delicate procedures. One slip of the hand and an organ, blood vessel, nerve, tendon, ligament, or other tissue can be significantly damaged. Organs such as the intestines or liver may be damaged, as well as arteries, veins, and various nerves. Cuts and nicks to the appendix can cause severe and life-threatening infections, while a cut to a nerve during surgery can cause paralysis.
Performing the wrong surgery
Believe it or not, some surgeons perform the wrong procedure or perform the right procedure on the wrong body part. If a surgeon performs the wrong surgery, a patient will have to recover from the incorrect surgery and then later undergo the correct one. Sometimes, as is the case with amputations, the patient will never fully recover from an incorrect surgical procedure.
