As we grow up, we are taught to respect and trust authority. When your teacher tells you to work on your homework, you go home 
and crack the books. If a coach informs you that you need to work on your performance, then you spend extra time doing laps to bring your performance up. There is no one that we are expected to trust and respect more than doctors. These medical professionals have dedicated years of their lives and thousands of dollars to learning about the human body and the potential illnesses or injuries that can affect it. Most people have grown up with regular checkups and visits to the doctor. While doctors are human beings and can make mistakes, we always expect them to do their absolute best and always have the patient’s best interests in mind. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Sometimes a doctor can misdiagnose or dismiss a patient, leading to long term health issues and consequences that get worse over time. When this happens, a patient must take the power back into their hands through personal injury lawyers. These professionals are trained to identify issues with a doctor’s misdiagnosis and help a victim gain resources that can facilitate their recovery. Medical malpractice lawyers help minimize the damage from a misdiagnosis. To find out more about the avenue of action you can take after a doctor fails you, read on.
Do No Harm: Why Some Doctors Aren’t At Their Peak When Dealing With Patients
We like to imagine that our doctor is always at the top of his or her game when we visit him for an appointment. Shockingly, sometimes he or she can be underslept, overslept, hungover, or even high! One in ten physicians grapple with an addiction to drugs or alcohol. Doctors also are not immune to the pressure we feel during summer or the end of a week. The amount of malpractice cases spike on a Friday, as your physician probably just wants to go home and enjoy their rare time off. Meanwhile, in July doctors go on vacation, and so new professionals take their place. Finally, there is a shortage of certain medical professionals and medical facilities are overwhelmed by people who need help. There are long wait times and lots of red tape blocking your average person from seeing a specialist. Personal injury lawyers see a shocking amount of patients that are ignored or maligned by a doctor. All of these factors combine to ensure that going to see a medical professional can be a gamble – will you get an expert who is awake, sober, and focused, or someone who sees you as a number on a chart that needs to be checked off before they go home?
Patience With Patients: Why Some People Get Worse Treatment Than Others
Further complicating this equation is the fact that medical professionals can hold dangerous biases towards certain patients. These biases can manifest in misdiagnoses and other dangerous advice. For instance, a male doctor can sometimes see female patients as blowing things out of proportion, being hysterical hypochondriacs, or dealing with psychosomatic (psychologically induced with no physical cause) pain. Working off these assumptions, a doctor can tell a female patient that her migraine is due to stress, when really further testing could reveal a tumour. An overweight patient might be told to go lose weight when really their thyroid is malfunctioning and causing serious chemical imbalances. When these patients leave with their supposed diagnoses, their condition will only worsen, and can lead to serious health problems and in extreme cases even death. After this point, personal injury lawyers would need to intervene due to malpractice. When patients are in pain or struggling with illness and injury, they often can’t bring themselves to advocate against a person in authority. That’s why the presence of a lawyer is so important.
When Do Medical Malpractice Lawyers Need to Intervene?
Sometimes a misdiagnoses is unfortunate but action doesn’t need to be taken. For instance, someone who is ill might be given antibiotics when they could fight the infection off on their own. While this is technically a mistake on the doctor’s part and will lead to long term health ramifications, those exact consequences are quite minor and are part of a systemic problem with how we view antibiotics as a society. However, if a doctor informs you that your breathing issues and chronic pain are because you are overweight and sends you away with instructions to exercise, and it turns out that those symptoms could have easily been checked with further testing to reveal a serious problem, then it is time for intervention. Personal injury lawyers can advocate on behalf of the wronged party. Justice could mean that the patient gets the resources to obtain the treatment and care they need, and minimize the damage of the misdiagnoses. It could also lead to the doctor facing professional consequences. Oftentimes after dealing with unprofessional medical care, people blame themselves. Instead, they should fight back with the support of a lawyer.
Personal injury lawyers help fight back against doctors who have misdiagnosed a family member’s illness. These professionals are sometimes unprepared for the duties of the day ahead, overwhelmed by personal circumstances, or simply dealing with their own biases and baggage. In any case, they should be held accountable for the damage they caused. Ultimately, the patient and their needs should come first. They put their trust and health in the hands of professionals. For a doctor to discard that and take actions that lead to further medical issues is an act that demands justice. If a family member has been misdiagnosed, don’t allow the issue to be swept under the rug.
