INJURY | PERSONAL INJURY LAWYER | PERSONAL INJURY ATTORNEY | INJURIES

Getting the correct treatment right away is important. It could mean the difference between life and death. When doctors fail to properly diagnose, treat or prevent illness and injury, patients are the ones who suffer. Medical expenses increase, as does pain and injury.

Treatment delays happen for a number of reasons. People caring for their elders sometimes have a hard time convincing them to go to the hospital. However, when there is a concern, seeking proper medical attention immediately is very important. Catching and treating cancer at its earliest stages, for example, provides the best possible chance of full recovery. Injuries and illnesses rarely heal themselves, so any treatment delay is only prolonging the pain and suffering or making it worse.

Treatment also might be delayed because of a full hospital waiting room or an appointment cancellation. If you consider your illness or injury to be serious and you are in need of immediate attention, consider going straight to the emergency room or calling 911. Or you could immediately seek an appointment with a specialist (unless the specialist only works on a referral basis), rather than going to a general practitioner and later being referred to a specialist.

Treatment could be delayed because of misdiagnosis, hospital negligence or lab negligence such as faulty testing, misplaced lab results, failure to refer to a specialist, and use of faulty equipment or methods. This is where it starts to get even more expensive; paying for extra lab tests and seeking new opinions is time-consuming and costly.

If you have experienced treatment delays due to no fault of your own, you may be eligible for compensation for your medical expenses, further injury, future expenses, and pain and suffering. Contact a personal injury attorney as soon as possible.

Misread X-rays and mammograms are a major indication of hospital negligence and medical malpractice. Sometimes mistakes happen. However, if the hospital and its staff don’t take the extra precautions to ensure accurate results, they are being negligent. For example, if X-rays are only glanced at once without a second look, doctors can easily miss an important aspect. Or, if X-rays are accidentally swapped with someone else’s and no precautionary measures are taken to make sure this doesn’t happen, the hospital is being negligent. 

Misread X-rays can lead to increased injury because a broken bone isn’t correctly treated or a tumor isn’t diagnosed. Misread mammograms can lead to the spread of cancer and death. X-rays are misread due to mistakes, but if those mistakes aren’t corrected, the doctor, the technician and the hospital are at fault.

It’s the same with misread mammograms. Hospitals and their staff should make sure to use functioning, up-to-date equipment, double check all tests, make sure to properly label them with the patient’s name, and take extra X-rays and mammograms if there is any doubt.

• if bones are broken or fractured
• if bones are dislocated
• if bones that have been surgically treated are healing properly
• some spine injuries
• whether a person has cavities or other dental problems
• the extent of a gunshot or stab wound
• some soft tissue diseases
• lung issues such as cancer or pneumonia

• a broken bone isn’t correctly treated
• a tumor isn’t diagnosed
• a fracture goes unnoticed
• unhealthy organs and bones aren’t treated
• illnesses aren’t diagnosed

Mammograms are X-rays of the chest, and are taken of women and men, since men can get breast cancer as well. Mammograms tell doctors about:

• irregularities in breast tissue
• tumors in the breast

Mammograms are best when paired with ultrasounds and MRI scans if the doctor is concerned about mammogram reading. Misread mammograms can lead to increased injury because:

• an ultrasound or MRI is not requested as a follow-up

• cancer needs to be caught at early stages in order to be completely treated
• cancer spreads rapidly
• treatments are started because the doctor mistakenly thinks the person has cancer

If you are a victim of a misread X-ray or mammogram, you should contact a personal injury lawyer who specializes in medical malpractice.

Because negligence is often involved, medical malpractice victims are strongly urged to seek compensation. Mistakes made by medical professionals can be painful, irreversible, and even deadly. They represent an unfair betrayal of trust. Medical malpractice victims should seek legal help immediately.

Have you been hurt by medical malpractice?
Frequently caused by overworked doctors, misplaced paperwork, and other errors, medical malpractice can happen in the emergency room, at the dentist office, or in the laboratory. Frequent malpractice injuries include:

• Amputation of the wrong limb
  
• Cerebral palsy and brain injuries at birth
  
• Disfigurement
  
• Faulty blood transfusions
  
• Wrongful death

What are the results of medical malpractice?
Medical mistakes can be expensive and heartbreaking. In addition to medical expenses already incurred, victims have to pay for their new injury. They may be incapacitated indefinitely, losing employment and ability to care for themselves. Worst of all, malpractice can rob families of a parent, grandparent, or child.

What if you’ve been the victim of medical malpractice?
Because of the high incidence of negligence in medical malpractice, victims are urged to contact a legal professional. Many attorneys specialize in obtaining compensation for victims of medical malpractice and will give you a free case consultation.

Laboratory negligence occurs when technicians fail to accurately obtain test results due to unreasonable actions. This can result in misdiagnosis and failure to provide appropriate treatment. If a lab technician, doctor, or other hospital or laboratory employee acts unreasonably, it means they knowingly made mistakes (or didn’t correct mistakes) such as:

• hurrying results
• not checking for accuracy
• using inappropriate or faulty equipment
• not collecting samples accurately
• not conducting the test in an effective way
• losing test results or samples and getting patients’ results mixed up
• failing to accurately report the results to the doctor and/or patient
• not double-checking positive results that indicate disease

In legal terms, laboratories and their employees have a responsibility to take reasonable care when collecting, handling and testing patient samples.

Laboratory tests are done for hospitals, dentist offices and other healthcare providers. Laboratory negligence can sometimes be linked to dental malpractice, pediatric malpractice, plastic surgery malpractice and hospital negligence. Laboratories check patients’ blood, semen, skin, tissue, fluid, stool and other samples to test for illnesses including:

• cancer
• heart and other organ disease
• all viruses
• bacterial infections
• drug use

Almost any type of illness occurring in the human body can be tested in a laboratory setting. Returning accurate results is important for the diagnosis, care and treatment of patients. Without accurate results, patients can be left untreated, they can receive the wrong treatment, they might unknowingly infect others, and they might die.

Recent cases of laboratory negligence include:

·        A man who was told he had tuberculosis even though he was healthy. His doctor started him on tuberculosis medicine, which was costly and made him very sick.

·        A woman’s cancer went undiagnosed because of faulty testing practices. She later died even though the cancer could have been treated had it been caught earlier.

·        A woman gave birth to a baby with an illness that could have been treated had the laboratory not mixed up her sample with someone else’s.

If you or a loved one experiences laboratory negligence, contact a personal injury attorney who specializes in medical malpractice.

When doctors and other healthcare personnel fail to provide appropriate treatment, injuries can become worse, fail to heal, and result in serious injury and death. Failing to provide appropriate treatment includes:

• failing to accurately diagnose an illness or injury
• failing to refer you to a specialist
• failing to properly treat and medicate the illness or injury
• taking a cast or sling off too soon
• under medicating or overmedicating
• prescribing the wrong medication
• further injuring the patient

Failing to provide appropriate treatment can be medical malpractice if the doctor or other staff can be found negligent. Negligent means that the doctor didn’t perform to the best of his/her abilities, and instead acted in a rash, uncaring and ignorant manner. Being negligent means that although the doctor was aware of or capable of finding better treatments, better instruments and better medications, he/she chose to treat the patient with less suitable or blatantly incorrect or inadequate methods.

Failure to provide appropriate treatment can be devastating. For example, if a doctor fails to appropriately treat cancer, the cancer can worsen, resulting in the patient’s death. If a doctor fails to appropriately treat an infection, the infection can spread and worsen, leading to amputation or death. If a doctor fails to appropriately resuscitate or anesthetize a patient, the patient can suffer brain injury, fall into a coma, and die.

If your doctor fails to provide you with appropriate treatment, you should contact a personal injury lawyer as soon as possible.

Cancer misdiagnosis can be fatal; surviving cancer starts by catching it early. Cancer misdiagnosis can happen for a number of reasons, and it happens often. More than 12 percent of cancers are initially misdiagnosed. What is equally scary is how long it takes to fix the misdiagnosis, and then begin treating the cancer. Many lives are lost during that initial misdiagnosis. 

Cancer is misdiagnosed for many reasons, including:

• insensitive results
• poor sampling techniques
• reader error
• diagnosing the tumor as benign
• mistaking a tumor for an infection
• failure to order X-rays
• failure to conduct accurate testing
• failure to refer patient to a specialist
• failure to begin necessary treatment

You can help protect yourself from misdiagnosis by being very clear about your symptoms. Also, make sure to ask questions, seek second and even third opinions, and trust your instincts. You know your body better than anyone else. In fact, in a recent case, one man saw 19 doctors before one finally diagnosed him with cancer. The other doctors told him he had a throat infection and gave him antibiotics. If the first doctors could have diagnosed him correctly, his chances for survival would be much better. He eventually had to undergo surgery to remove his tongue and voice box. In a similar case, it took 40 doctors to diagnose a woman’s brain cancer. Many told her she was suffering from a psychological problem. Eventually, an ear, nose, eye and throat specialist gave her an MRI and discovered a brain tumor. In other cases, brain tumors were misdiagnosed as excessive earwax or sinus infections.

In the U.S., medical errors cause 100,000 preventable deaths and more than 1 million preventable injuries each year. Early detection makes most cancers completely curable, such as breast cancer. When detected early and confined to the breast, patients are expected to make a 100 percent recovery. Colorectal cancer is also 100 percent treatable when pre-cancerous polyps are discovered and removed early on. Other cancers that can be treated successfully if they are detected early include lung, breast, prostate, colon, ovarian, cervical, testicular and kidney cancers. If you are a victim of cancer misdiagnosis, contact a medical malpractice attorney to help recover the medical expenses and to seek damages for pain and suffering.