Suffering harm at the hands of a health care provider can be emotionally devastating. After all, these are the professionals you thought you could trust to make your medical issues better.
When a medical provider makes a mistake that leaves you injured, you have every right to bring a claim – but do not expect the process to be simple or easy. No matter how solid your claim, the other party will likely look for ways to challenge it. One way they might do this is to seize on a social media post you or someone close to you makes.
Expect your social media to be monitored
Those defending healthcare professionals sometimes monitor claimants’ social media. They are not doing this out of curiosity or compassion, but to look for anything that would support a narrative that makes your claim look false or weak.
It is easier than you think to give them what they need. For example, imagine that you have a terrible back injury due to a surgeon’s error, which makes working, shopping and even playing with your kids very difficult.
A few weeks after you initiate a personal injury claim, it’s your child’s birthday party, and your spouse snaps and posts a photo of you holding your child up in the air, with huge grins on your faces. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing — your child came running toward you, and you swept them up as you always used to, both of you forgetting about how delicate your back was.
What the photo does not show, of course, is that you were left in agony after that simple action and unable to do anything but lie down for the whole next week. The defense may claim the photo is proof that you are not nearly as hurt as you say and can indeed continue to live a relatively normal life.
Legal guidance can help you understand the actions you need to take to advance your claim, and those you need to be wary of because they may harm your medical malpractice claim.