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Doctors owe their patients a reasonable standard of medical care, legally. If you have medical tests conducted, never assume that no news is good news. While many offices have a policy of not calling when normal test results come in, the statistics indicate that medical professionals fail to tell patients of abnormal results 7% of…

Wrong-site surgical procedures are negligent medical errors and shouldn’t happen. Unfortunately, human error leads to chart mix-ups and other grave mistakes that cause surgeons to operate on the wrong body parts. These claims often fall under the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur, which means “the thing speaks for itself.” In practice, this doctrine holds that…

Physicians may ask you to sign an informed consent document while under their care. An informed consent document, when signed, indicates the patient understands the potential risks and benefits of a proposed course of treatment and gives the health care provider permission to perform that service. Being asked to sign a consent form is typical…

Your first thought might be that having bed rails is most certainly safer than not having them. In reality, they offer a mix of benefits and drawbacks for young children and the elderly. According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as many as 803 patients in hospitals and nursing homes were injured or died…

According to the most recently available data from 2010, the total annual cost of medical malpractice in the United States is around $55.6 billion. As of that time, the amount was 2.4% of all healthcare spending. The number seems very high when you first look at it, but considering it is only 2.4% of all…

Not every failure to diagnose is considered medical malpractice. There are many good reasons why a physician may have hesitated or avoided diagnosing a condition. Sometimes patient-doctor communication may be to blame. In other cases, symptom profiles may closely mimic other conditions that are more common in society. Since the right answer is often the…

Many surgeries are considered elective which means they are not emergency procedures or necessary to preserve a patient’s health. Rather, they are surgeries patients choose to have done as a preventative measure, as a result of medical diagnoses, for quality of life, or for superficial reasons. However, that does not mean they are any less…

Surgeons have tough jobs. Not only do they have to know the human body like the backs of their own hands, they must also take into account an individual’s personal medical history and balance all of the information under time constraints and in high-pressure environments. Unfortunately, mistakes do happen in those settings. Surgical errors are…

The most common surgeries in the United States are so routine that many people do not think twice about their associated dangers. The majority of these common surgical procedures, in-patient and out-patient, are second nature procedures for surgeons. They complete them as a matter of routine, and most go according to plan. However, popular procedures…

When a commercial for sleeping pills comes on television or you seen an advertisement in a magazine, you may glaze over the exhaustive list of warnings and side effects. Pharmaceutical companies are required by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to list the potential dangers and side effects in any marketing campaign, but that does…