Reasonable Care And The Medical Malpractice Lawsuit: What Every Patient Should Know
What exactly is medical malpractice? At its heart, medical malpractice occurs when a doctor or other medical professional fails in his or her duty to exercise reasonable care when handling a patient's condition and the patient ends up injured as a result.
Exactly what counts as "reasonable care," however, can be the subject of heated debate -- and is often the focus of many medical malpractice lawsuits.
Why is there ever any debate over what constitutes reasonable care?
The definition of what can be considered "reasonable care" changes from situation to situation -- especially in medical malpractice cases.
Loosely, medical malpractice is caused by negligence. Negligence happens when a physician or other medical profession deviates from what is considered normal or standard in the medical community. However, what's considered a normal standard of care for one medical community might be very different from what's considered normal (and expected) in another.
How do you know the difference between what's normal medical care and what deviates from the norm?
That's often why a medical malpractice attorney has to get involved. It can be very difficult for a layperson to tell when a doctor deviated from acceptable norms. Sometimes, there's really no question that a doctor made a big mistake -- like when a surgeon operates on the wrong patient or wrong limb. However, most medical malpractice claims are more complicated.
For example, consider this: You live in a small town where there are only a couple of family doctors available. There's no hospital in your town. In fact, the nearest hospital is in another small town about a 45-minute drive away. You complain to your family doctor of wheezing and a cough. Your doctor diagnoses it as asthma and treats you accordingly. Only after you fail to improve for several months -- and actually get worse -- does your doctor send you for a chest x-ray and refer you to a pulmonologist where it's discovered that you have mesothelioma of the lungs.
Should your family doctor have referred you to a pulmonologist right away? Should he at least have ordered an x-ray, even though it meant a trip to the next town over? A jury would have to consider the doctor's knowledge, experience, the reason behind the doctor's delay, and what is considered "standard" by other local medical professionals.
On the other hand, if you lived in a big city and saw your doctor with the same complaint and your doctor failed to send you for an x-ray of the lungs or refer you to a pulmonologist right away, it might be a lot easier to decide that doctor was negligent.
What should you do if you think your doctor was negligent?
If you think your doctor should have exercised more care and that lead to a delayed diagnosis of your condition or a missed diagnosis and you've suffered harm as a result, talk to a medical malpractice attorney right away. Your time to seek compensation for your losses is limited by law, so don't delay.
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