Medical Malpractice

A recent ruling by a federal appeals court has put cruise lines on notice that they could be held fully responsible for medical malpractice if their medical staff fails to take proper care of their guests. Significantly, in coming to the decision, the appeals court...

According to a recent report by the Department of Health and Human Services, there has been a decrease in preventable medical errors in recent years, to the tune of 17 percent. Because of this, the report noted, fewer patients have died and there has been savings in...

In our last couple posts, we’ve been speaking about the elements of medical malpractice claims, focusing particularly on the harm element, which can be said to tie together the other elements, at least in claims which have merit. The same could also, though, be...

In our last post, we spoke briefly about the basic elements in a medical malpractice case. To briefly recap, these are: duty; breach; causation; and harm. Here, we’d like to talk briefly about the harm element, which kind of ties together the first three...

Medical errors occur all the time, but those who are familiar with the area of medical malpractice know that it is only a fraction of medical errors which ultimately provide the basis for successful medical malpractice lawsuits. There are a variety of reasons for...

The principles of the practice of medicine and the standards of care that apply to health care professionals are not something those of us who work outside the profession are qualified to speak about in a court of law. Because the issues that come up in malpractice...

Medical error is more commonplace than many Americans realize. According to Consumer Reports, an estimated 440,000 Americans die each year after suffering medical errors. To be fair, it isn’t clear how closely medical errors are tied to those patient...

For consumers of medical services, which is all of us, the way we approach purchasing health care is very different from the way we think about purchasing, say, a home, car or electric razor. For the average person, it is very difficult to make any kind of objective...

A recent article in the Huffington Post, looking at the current Ebola epidemic and the risk here in the United States, asked the interesting question of whether or not physicians have a duty to treat patients who present the symptoms of Ebola. While we would like to...

What if there was a single test doctors could use to screen for various types of cancer? A recent research effort conducted at the National Cancer Research Institute in Liverpool looked at thousands of previous scientific publications with the aim of determining...