Medical malpractice is a serious issue in the field of healthcare. Though we don’t know how many actual instances of medical malpractice occur in the U.S., we do know what those cases seem like and why they happen. These instances have some thing in common: somewhere in the process for analyzing and treating the person, someone has failed to act responsibly and caused otherwise preventable harm consequently. In this post, we have gathered three of the major common reasons for medical malpractice.

Failure to Diagnose

Diagnosis can be very difficult-even the most experienced and trained doctors can miss crucial clues or make mistakes in identifying a problem. Many symptoms can stem from many problems, and sometimes even what looks like one condition can end up being something else entirely. To help identify the problem, doctors use a method called “differential diagnosis.” In a differential diagnosis, a doctor assesses the patient and makes a list of plausible causes by asking questions and running tests. Sometimes, this method is not enough and this could lead to failure to identify something that other competent doctors in similar situations would make or inaccurate information that came from faulty laboratory equipment or improper procedures.

Failure to Treat Properly

You’ve probably heard horror stories about surgeons forgetting equipment like gloves or forceps inside a patient. Since this has happened, these obvious mistakes are not very common – but improper treatment is much more common. For example, many patients would not know if they received the wrong medication or the wrong dose, but doctors may write the wrong dose on a prescription, and doctors or pharmacists may dispense the wrong amount. Devices such as pumps designed to dispense medication over a long time can malfunction, causing the person to receive an inappropriate amount of medication or no medication at all. During surgery, the doctor may severe an organ or perhaps work on the wrong one. The slightest mistake in anesthesia can lead to significant injury or death as well.

Failure to Warn the Patient

Before starting any treatment, it is the doctor’s responsibility to warn and educate the patient about the risks. Only then can the patient properly decide whether to consent to the procedure, a condition known as “informed consent.” However, this does not mean that the physician must record all possible side effects or outcomes, which is often impossible. Instead, the physician has to inform patients of these very likely and acute dangers, often referred to as “significant” risks. There are some scenarios, such as emergencies, or when the person is in a delicate psychological or emotional state, where informed consent from doctors is not essential. However, it is critical to know if a malpractice proceeding will occur: either the doctor failed to warn the patient when other competent doctors would have, or another normal patient, in the same situation, would have changed her mind if she had known of the risk.…