While medical patients and family members tend to entrust doctors and medical attendants with the highest degree of responsibility, to the extent of sometimes literally placing a life in their hands, there are circumstances wherein such trust may not always be proven to have been rightly placed. Doctors, like all human beings, are prone to errors and mistakes, and on occasion negligence.
Dangerous mistakes may occur owing to a doctor’s negligence or lack of due care. As such, the law tends to frown upon medical care gone wrong or surgical errors that cause serious injury to patients, and as a result legal remedies often include considerable amounts of compensation to be paid to victims in medical malpractice lawsuits.
It is not always the case that a patient suffers from the side effects of improper medical care immediately afterward. Even if it takes a few years for the conditions to surface, the patient can usually still initiate a lawsuit, provided the cause of the discomfort or injury can be traced back to the medical negligence. A case in point would be the recent lawsuit filed in Louisiana by a patient against her doctor after she found out her neck surgery had been improperly performed.
In this case, an improperly conducted surgery and improperly placed intervertebral spacer are alleged to be responsible for the patient’s discomfort. As in this case, the medical institution is also often made a party to medical malpractice lawsuits along with the doctor. However, to enhance one’s chances of winning a substantial amount of compensation in such lawsuits, getting the right information about all of the available options may prove to be invaluable.
Source: The Louisiana Record, “Doctor sued for allegedly performing improper neck surgery,” Lizzy Fitzsousa, April 9, 2014
