Your health care providers are often trustworthy and comforting. Having a doctor by your side through a troubling diagnosis or getting helpful information from a kind pharmacist when you start a new medication can be life-changing. The health care professionals in your life should always do what they can to ensure you are healthy. Unfortunately, this is not always the…
If you had to guess the third most common cause of death in the United States, what would it be? Maybe cancer? Cardiovascular disease? Surprisingly enough, the answer is medical errors. A recent study says that medical mistakes cause more than 250,000 Americans to die each year. Other reports say the number is higher–440,000 deaths due to medical errors. Why are mistakes…
Medical malpractice can be deadly. These days, when it occurs in connection with opioids and other restricted prescriptions, it can result in criminal charges as well as lawsuits. Two years after the police turned the office of an Ohio doctor upside down looking for evidence that the he was trafficking drugs to his patients, the physician has been charged with…
Few medical mistakes are as scary as the ones that involve surgery. Surgical errors are devastating events that one would hope would never occur. When a doctor makes a mistake during surgery, it is generally a sign there are serious safety issues. There are plenty of different types of surgical mistakes and the same goes for what causes them. Below…
Patient abandonment occurs any time your doctor abruptly discontinues your care and leaves you without available time or resources to find suitable replacement care. It’s a serious form of medical malpractice. It doesn’t matter if your relationship with the doctor was long-standing, like with a primary care physician you’ve had for years, or recent — even sudden, like with an…
If you’re suffering from any sort of chronic illness, sudden shift in your health or need surgery, you may need an advocate to keep from becoming one of the thousands of people that are victimized by medical mistakes each year. You can be your own medical advocate, if you’re up to the task. If not, you can ask a close…
Can a doctor-patient relationship really exist when neither the doctor nor the patient have met? What about when the patient doesn’t even know the doctor’s name? Actually, increasingly, the courts are saying that it’s a possibility that should be left up to the jury to decide. The situation is created by what is often referred to as “curbside consults.” That’s…
Social media is currently producing an interesting effect on the world at large. Facebook has over 1.5 billion people while Twitter has 320 million users, according to data presented by Adweek. While many people post about most aspects of their lives on social media, they should avoid it at all costs when in the middle of a medical malpractice case. A…
If something goes wrong after a medical procedure, does an apology from your doctor automatically mean that your doctor is admitting that he or she made a mistake? Not under Ohio law. The state’s Supreme Court made a recent ruling that makes this rule crystal clear. A doctor’s apology is an expression of sympathy or regret for the patient and…