Have you ever been the victim of medical profiling? The odds are good that you may have been — even if you didn’t realize it at the time. Medical profiling occurs when a doctor makes assumptions about you based on his or her personal prejudices due to your age, gender, race, education, income, occupation or looks. For example, many young…
Pregnancy and childbirth are hard on a woman’s body — but a doctor’s mistake can make that hardship worse by leaving her incontinent long after her labor and delivery are over. One of the questions medical professionals have tried to answer over the years is what causes some women to develop incontinence after childbirth and not others, despite seemingly similar…
In a nutshell, informed consent is your right to know enough information about your own medical condition and the risks of any medical procedure you are about to have in order to make an educated decision about whether or not you want to proceed. It sounds simple enough, right? Unfortunately, patients are often handed a sheet of paper that lists…
If you have an existing doctor-patient relationship, your doctor has a duty to make certain that you receive any critical, ongoing care that you need. Failing to do so is considered patient abandonment — which is a type of medical malpractice. Patient abandonment can be obvious — when your doctor suddenly drops you from his or her practice without adequate…
Poor record keeping, including incomplete documentation, ranks among the top 10reasons that physicians get sued — and rightly so. While more and more doctors offices are moving toward computerized records that allow them to track your health history, send your prescriptions directly to the pharmacy and keep an updated list of your conditions, the electronic system is far from perfect.…
The recent trend shows that not as many lawsuits for medical malpractice are seeing success through settlements or the court system. This is not all bad news however as on the whole, those who succeed are getting larger awards than they were in the past. The reason behind the changes is likely tort reform, which focus on reducing frivolous lawsuits…
There are many ways to reduce your risk of suffering from medical malpractice. One of the first things you can do is to make sure your physician is really listening to your concerns. If you feel that he or she is writing off what you’re saying or dismissing your concerns, you may wish to get a second opinion. Sticking with…
A medical mistake is not necessarily medical malpractice, but any error that occurs can lead to litigation. There are three elements to any medical malpractice case. These include having a duty of care to a patient, breaching the duty of care, showing that an injury is related to that breach and damages. Not all medical mistakes occur because a doctor…
Many women suffer an injury during childbirth. It’s simply impossible to proceed through childbirth without some stress on the body. The pelvis is at risk for a fracture, or the pelvic floor might lose its strength. Most women know that some recovery time is expected, but how much is too much? In one woman’s situation, she thought that something was…