The term “malpractice” refers to bad medical treatment. When you are given poor, incorrect, or incomplete medical care, your symptoms can grow worse. You may even develop new problems that spring from your original issue.
If you’ve suffered medical malpractice, you may be entitled to financial compensation. You could receive reimbursement for your medical bills, missed wages, potential lost income, and your pain and suffering. Medical malpractice cases can be particularly egregious, which could allow you to receive punitive damages as well. This is extra money the court uses to punish a defendant.
Malpractice happens for a variety of reasons. Here are some of the most common.
- Misdiagnosis
Many illnesses can mirror one another. Fatigue, for example, could be the result of anything from ME to cancer.
Your doctor is responsible for ruling out all possible causes of your illness. It’s reasonable for them to start small, treating you for the most likely ailments, working their way up when those treatments aren’t effective.
What’s unreasonable is for a doctor to completely misdiagnose a patient with the wrong illness. They can start treating you for a condition you don’t have, which can lead to serious damage.
- Improper Treatment
Even when doctors properly diagnose a problem, they can do a poor job of treating it. Here are some examples.
Insufficient Testing
In many situations, one ailment can cause another. This is often referred to as a “comorbidity.” A thorough doctor should look for all the potential problems associated with your condition. Sometimes, doctors can do a fine job of treating one issue, while letting an undetected one grow worse.
They could also order the wrong tests, leaving you to believe you are not ill while your problems increase.
Poor Instruction and Follow-Up
Treatment doesn’t begin and end inside the doctor’s office. In most cases, they should give you instructions on how to keep yourself healthy and healing at home. Failing to do so can keep medical problems stagnant, meaning you never fully recover.
You should also be returning to your doctor regularly until everyone is sure you are fine. Failure to schedule follow-ups could make you believe you need no further treatment, causing your illness to exacerbate.
Ignoring Your Medical History
A good doctor should consider all your past illnesses. It can allow them to see a pattern and help you find solutions to your problems. Your history will also let them know which treatments are ineffective.
- Incorrect Medication
Medicine is specifically designed to target certain ailments and treat them. If you take the wrong prescriptions, they can go to work on parts of your body that are functioning perfectly well and start causing damage. Furthermore, you will suffer side effects from a drug you should not be taking in the first place.
- Surgical Errors
This is one of the more terrifying examples of medical malpractice.
There are many possible ways for a surgery to go wrong, including:
- The surgery is simply done poorly.
- Instruments or other foreign objects are left in open wounds.
- Clerical mix-ups cause someone to receive the wrong surgery.
Our firm is here to help those who’ve been victimized by medical malpractice. For a free consultation, call Masella Law Firm, P.A. today at (803) 938-4952, or contact us online.