Medical negligence is a very broad term given to a very wide variety of incidents in which a doctor or someone with a medical license makes some type of mistake that results in the injury or death of a patient. Such areas include birth injuries, misdiagnosis or misdiagnosis, or improper treatment. These are just three of many other areas of medical malpractice.
Birth injuries are basically any injury to a baby during delivery that could have been prevented by the action of the delivering physician. For example, if there are difficulties during labor and a doctor doesn’t perform a C-section to get the baby oxygen, brain damage can occur. This is an example of a birth injury that could have been prevented with quicker action or overall action by the delivering physician. Many birth injury situations involve unforeseeable complications that should be treated as best as possible when they occur. In other situations, a birth injury is preventable and may be the result of medical error, negligence, or malpractice. Birth injuries and birth trauma are often considered the same thing. Common causes of birth injuries include:
– Complications during pregnancy
– Inappropriate quotes
– Complications during childbirth
– Obstetrics and gynecology errors, such as mishandling an instrument, incorrect delivery technique, incorrect estimation of the date of birth, incorrect prenatal tests, failure to perform a cesarean section in a timely manner, misdiagnosis, and failure to treat a condition.
– Obstetric errors such as failure to recognize fetal distress, failure to diagnose or treat infections, and failure to respond to complications in a timely manner.
Missed or misdiagnoses are exactly what they sound like. They involve a doctor misdiagnosing an illness or injury or a doctor failing to diagnose something that is there. An example of a disease misdiagnosis would be diagnosing someone with type 2 diabetes as having type 1 diabetes. Quite often, these errors are quite dangerous, as they often involve incorrect treatment. Doctors can also diagnose something when a patient is really healthy. The reverse of this situation is also true.
Improper treatment is also very similar to what it appears to be. It is about treating an illness or injury incorrectly. Incorrect treatment of a disease often results in the disease becoming worse or a different disease developing. For incorrect treatment to come into play, a doctor must first correctly diagnose the illness or injury. Only then can the problem of inappropriate treatment be raised.
These are just three of the many areas of medical malpractice that personal injury lawyers see on a daily basis.
