Medical Malpractice

Medical professionals use a wide variety of tests to screen and diagnose cancer, and make use of a variety of clinical guidelines to determine when diagnostic testing is appropriate and when it is unnecessary. These guidelines vary depending not only on the research...

For counseling professionals, particularly those who prescribe medications and/or monitor their use by patients, the ability to manage medication-related risks is critical to ensuring the safety of patients and avoiding liability. This is important not only for...

Errors in health care can involve a wide variety of circumstances. Whether a patient is in a medical or surgical setting, a mental health setting, or some other area of health care, there is always a risk that something can go wrong. When a patient is harmed in the...

In our last post, we began looking at the unfortunate lack of transparency in medical care, and the effort in some quarters of the profession to improve the situation by adopting policies requiring physicians to more readily empathize with patients when errors do...

Mistakes occur all the time in medical care. Some of them are serious while others are relatively minor, having little or no long-term effect. As patients, we expect that our physicians will help guide us through the medical decision-making process, and this includes...

In health care, there are a variety of things that can go wrong, both when health care providers act negligently and even when they are doing their job according to accepted standards and procedures. Some of the mistakes made by health care providers can be attributed...

In our previous post, we pointed out that, in addition to the statutory requirements that must be met by expert witnesses, there is also the issue of the credibility of the witness that must be carefully considered. This is important not only because a witness who...

In recent posts, we looked briefly at what exactly an affidavit of merit is and the requirement a physician must meet in order to sign off on an affidavit. As we noted, physicians must meet the same requirements as an expert witness, which we briefly summarized last...

The concept of merit is an important one when pursuing medical malpractice litigation. Merit refers to the plaintiff's basis for pursuing the claim. A case which has merit has a valid basis such that a court could find that the plaintiff's legal rights have been...

Surgical procedures involve various risks. As we’ve pointed out in recent posts, surgeons can and do sometimes make mistakes. Sometimes these errors are serious and leave the patient with permanent health problems.A recent example of this is the case of an Oak...