Has Your Doctor Made a Mistake?
It is sometimes brutally difficult to be a patient. You must place a significant amount of trust in your healthcare providers, often without being able to easily verify whether their recommendations are well-founded. If no diagnosis is made but symptoms persist, you may have valid concerns that your doctor has “missed” something. If you are diagnosed and your diagnosis is advanced, you may have valid concerns that your condition should have been identified and treated sooner. If, after receiving treatment, your condition worsens, you may have valid concerns that your healthcare team has taken a wrong turn. And on, and on, and on.
The long and short of life as a patient is that it is often very difficult to discern whether any harm that you’re suffering is the result of a medical mistake, medical negligence, or a reckless form of medical malpractice. This is one of the reasons why it is so important to speak with an attorney if you believe that you may have been the victim of a medical mistake. Connecting with an attorney can help you to uncover the truth, whatever it may be. And as an experienced personal injury lawyer – including those who practice at Cohen & Cohen – can confirm, if you have strong grounds upon which to file legal action, you may be entitled to pursue significant compensation at this time.
Oftentimes, lawyers must thoroughly investigate the circumstances surrounding a possible medical mistake before they can confirm whether a mistake occurred and whether the nature of that mistake provides the affected patient with strong grounds upon which to file legal action. Not all medical mistakes are legally actionable. Generally speaking, only if the provider or facility in question owed you a “duty of care” under the law, breached that duty by providing you with substandard care, and you suffered physical harm and financial injury as a result of the mistake will it be considered actionable.
With that said, millions of medical mistakes occur in the U.S. annually and many of these are legally actionable. According to a famed study by researchers at Johns Hopkins, medical mistakes are the third (non-pandemic-related) leading cause of death in the United States. Whether medical mistakes result in serious, catastrophic, or fatal consequences, victims and surviving loved ones who choose to hold providers legally accountable for their misconduct often help to inspire positive patient safety shifts within the system.