Healthcare is expensive, but your health is priceless. If you have been struggling to pay medical debts for years, you can at least console yourself that the medical treatment that wrecked your finances restored your health, and you are healthy enough to work to support your family and slowly chip away at your debt. What is worse is when medical treatment makes you sicker. Whether a routine medical procedure left you with a permanent disability or whether you recovered from the medical error but it caused you to require more treatment and therefore to incur more bills, you have the right to seek monetary damages if you have suffered medical malpractice. If a preventable medical error has left you with unaffordable medical bills, contact a Charlotte personal injury lawyer.
What is Medical Malpractice?
Medical malpractice is when a doctor makes a preventable error and causes a patient’s health to get worse. The error could be something as egregious as operating on the wrong body part or as subtle as not noticing a detail in the patient’s medical records that would influence the doctor’s decision about which drug to prescribe. If the error by a physician or other healthcare worker (such as a triage nurse who allowed a patient’s health to deteriorate in the emergency room waiting room while the doctors treated other patients) is the direct cause of the patient’s poor health outcome, it is medical malpractice. It is not always medical malpractice when a treatment does not work or when you get sick from a drug side effect.
In all personal injury lawsuits, you must show that the defendant breached the duty of care; in a medical malpractice lawsuit, this means that the doctor’s actions were outside the standard of care. It is obvious to all judges, jurors, and defendants that someone who was driving at 100 miles per hour on a city street was endangering other people. By contrast, the standard of care in medicine varies greatly from one instance to another, and the only way to find out whether the doctor’s actions were appropriate is to ask other doctors who perform the same type of treatments what they would have done in your case
For example, doctors must sometimes remove part of a patient’s rib in order to do a tissue biopsy to see whether a tumor in the chest is cancerous. You and I would not know which part of the rib to remove, nor would everyone who has graduated from medical school; not even every oncologist would know. You would need to ask a thoracic surgeon. Therefore, medical malpractice lawsuits often involve expert testimony from doctors with clinical experience in the same subfield of medicine as the defendant.
How Much Money Can You Win in a North Carolina Medical Malpractice Case?
Medical malpractice is when a doctor makes a preventable error and causes a patient’s health to get worse. The error could be something as egregious as operating on the wrong body part or as subtle as not noticing a detail in the patient’s medical records that would influence the doctor’s decision about which drug to prescribe. If the error by a physician or other healthcare worker (such as a triage nurse who allowed a patient’s health to deteriorate in the emergency room waiting room while the doctors treated other patients) is the direct cause of the patient’s poor health outcome, it is medical malpractice. It is not always medical malpractice when a treatment does not work or when you get sick from a drug side effect.
A medical malpractice lawyer can help you seek damages if you suffered financial losses because of a preventable medical error. Contact Plumides, Romano & Johnson, PC in Charlotte, North Carolina to discuss your case.