How Will I Know if My Doctor Has Committed Malpractice?

How Will I Know if My Doctor Has Committed Malpractice?

Like all professionals, doctors owe their clients a duty of care. When a doctor falls below this standard, you can receive money to correct the mistake and to compensate for any physical pain or emotional harm. How will you know if your doctor made a mistake that has injured you? Unfortunately, there is no clear sign. Instead, you will need to analyze all of the circumstances.

Types of Medical Malpractice

In North Carolina, doctors owe patients a duty to use the care that other doctors with similar training and experience would use in similar circumstances. Doctors can fall short of this standard of care in many different ways:

  • Failing to diagnose a condition that a careful doctor would have seen.
  • Misdiagnosing your condition.
  • Failing to order necessary tests.
  • Prescribing an improper course of treatment for your illness.
  • Improperly performing surgery.
  • Failing to follow up about your condition.
  • Failing to inform you of risks of a course of treatment.

Whether your doctor’s conduct was negligent will depend on the surrounding circumstances, such as what your doctor knows. For example, if you never tell your doctor about the pain in your abdomen, it is not reasonable to expect her to diagnose a stomach problem.

Signs of Medical Malpractice

Doctors are not in the habit of admitting to their mistakes. Furthermore, simply feeling pain is not a surefire sign that the doctor did anything wrong. After all, many medical procedures cause unavoidable pain even when performed properly.

Nevertheless, you can look for the following signs, which might indicate there is a problem:

  • Your doctor is avoiding you. A doctor with a guilty conscience might try to avoid talking to you so that they do not admit that they made a mistake.
  • You receive a different second opinion. In this situation, the first doctor might have failed to notice a medical condition.
  • Your doctor left implements inside you during surgery.
  • A loved one dies after surgery or develops complications. Some complications are unavoidable, but others indicate medical malpractice.
  • Your treatment has not worked. The course of treatment might fail because the doctor failed to diagnose you properly.
  • Your pain increases dramatically after treatment. In this case, your doctor might have ordered the wrong treatment.

 

Proving Medical Malpractice

If you bring a lawsuit, you have the burden of showing by a preponderance of evidence that your doctor fell below the standard of care and injured you. To prove, or even begin, your case, you must have an expert opinion from a medical provider in the same or similar specialty as the negligent provider and who is familiar with the local standard of care.  One advantage of working with an experienced firm like Hodges Coxe Potter & Phillips is that we can find appropriate medical experts who are skilled at explaining complicated medical concepts in a way the jury will understand.

Meet with a Wilmington, North Carolina Medical Malpractice Attorney

If you suspect something is wrong, you should quickly schedule a consultation with a North Carolina medical malpractice attorney. Your attorney can review your medical records and might advise that you see another doctor who can check you out. To schedule your free consultation, call 910-772-1678 or send an online message.