People who need surgery expect their surgeon to do their best to ensure the procedure is a success. While there aren’t any guarantees for surgical outcomes, surgeons are expected to uphold the standard of care and follow proper protocol during the procedure. There...
For many years, doctors were afraid to offer anything that resembled an apology for a mistake – whether it was a failure to diagnose a condition sooner, a treatment that only made a patient worse or a surgical error. That’s because they feared that even an expression...
There are no guarantees in medical practice. A procedure that has had a 0% complication rate for a physician historically could result in catastrophic failure one day. As a patient, you need to have accurate information so that you can decide what treatment to...
When a healthcare provider fails to provide appropriate treatment and causes an injury or death to a patient, it is referred to as medical malpractice. If you are a victim, the law provides recourse, and you have a right to be compensated for the harm you suffered....
Managing medications isn't always easy, but you would expect that medical professionals are better at it than you are as a patient. It is true that some people do make mistakes while administering their own prescription drugs. However, there are also thousands of...
Medical malpractice happens when a health care professional or other provider makes errors that harm a patient. Those errors can be anything from failing to provide the appropriate treatment to giving a substandard treatment that causes substantial harm. Misdiagnoses...
For decades, federal law and court precedent have effectively prevented military service members from taking legal action against the government because of injuries that they suffered in the line of duty. Under the Feres Doctrine, injured soldiers and grieving...
Imagine that you go in for surgery on your left knee. You have been having problems with it for some time and you can often barely walk. You're excited to get it fixed. Everything seems fine before the surgery, and they put you under to do the procedure. Then you wake...
Have you seen the commercial where a surgeon leaves his cellphone inside of a patient and only finds out when he gets a call after the procedure? It's meant to be funny, but it's not nearly as far from the truth as you may assume. The reality is that surgeons do leave...
There is a term in the medical community, which refers to some situations as "never-events." These have been described as preventable and serious mistakes. In short, they are things that should never happen -- and yet they do. Two examples of never-events are...