My Doctor Didn’t Listen to Me and I’ve Been Misdiagnosed? Do I Have Legal Options?
We all trust physicians and nurse practitioners to make accurate diagnoses. We never expect that such highly trained and knowledgeable health care providers would overlook obvious symptoms or draw unsupportable conclusions about the underlying causes of our illnesses.
The sad reality is that no one can correctly diagnosis a medical condition with 100 percent accuracy every time. Signs do get missed or misinterpreted, and patients often end up suffering—even dying—from health problems that could have been managed or resolved following a correct diagnosis.
If you or a family member has ended up hospitalized, disabled, or dead from what you suspect is a missed diagnosis, you may have grounds for filing a lawsuit with the help of a Cleveland medical malpractice attorney.
Not every mistake committed by a health care provider who is authorized to make diagnoses and prescribe treatments represents negligence. Sometimes, the symptoms were too mild, or the symptoms for one condition so closely matched the symptoms for another that the diagnosis amounted to a judgment call based on averages.
Consulting with a medical injury lawyer will help you understand whether taking legal again after a suspected misdiagnosis makes sense. The primary question that must be answered is whether a similarly trained and experienced health care provider would have issued the same diagnosis when presented with all the same facts.
Answering that question requires gathering extensive medical records and submitting them to experts who can determine whether the physician or nurse practitioner met the standard of care owed to the patient. Then, if the person who made the misdiagnosis is deemed negligent, evidence must exist to show that the patient would have suffered less or returned to health if the correct diagnosis was reached. Experts may conclude that even had a physician or nurse practitioner done everything correctly, the patient still would not have responded to the gold standard for treatment.
The fact is that succeeding with a medical malpractice case of any kind can be difficult. But plaintiffs can get their day in their court and receive compensation and damages when the evidence supports their claims.
As medical malpractice attorneys in Cleveland who have helped many patients and families hold negligent health care providers accountable for missing diagnoses, we know that mistakes by medical professionals cause untold suffering and cost too many lives. Let us know if we can be of service to you by requesting a free consultation. Call us at (800) 678-3318 or reach out to us online by completing this contact form.