What crosses your mind if a medical treatment doesn't improve your ill health or worsens it? While most people will be tempted to make medical malpractice claims, you should know that not all cases of health injuries constitute medical malpractice. Here are three reasons your injuries may not translate to medical malpractice:
Some Diseases Are Incurable
Some health issues just can't be treated. A doctor may make the correct diagnosis, give his or her best treatment advice, but still fail to rid your body of a disease. If that happens, you can't accuse the medical personnel of medical malpractice since he or she did not commit any negligence when treating you. A good example is a stage IV ovarian cancer; in this stage, the disease has spread to tissues outside the abdomen and pelvis. The five-year survival rate is a mere 18%, which means your condition may get worse despite the best treatment.
Even Treatable Diseases Are Complicated
Medical science hasn't reached a state where it guarantees cures or treatments, even for cases with known cures. Therefore, you don't have a medical malpractice case just because your health condition worsened in the hospital instead of getting better. As long as the doctor did everything a reasonably competent doctor could have done in his or her place, he or she is in the clear.
You Lacked a Doctor-Patient Relationship
One of the tenets of a medical malpractice suit is that the person you are alleging to have caused your injury must have had a doctor-patient relationship with you. Doctors can't be expected to be responsible for everything they say at all times. You can't rely on the chance remark to a friend or a story at the local bar and use them as the basis for your medical malpractice case.
Consider an example in which you happened to eavesdrop at a medical conference and overheard a discussion about a new treatment for a health condition plaguing you. If you try the treatment and it fails, you can't go after the speaker and claim medical malpractice since he or she wasn't your doctor. You can only do that if you agreed to hire the doctor and they consented to treat you.
Medical malpractice cases tend to be very complicated. There is no use making a claim without first confirming if it is valid or strong enough to win you a compensation package. The only way to do this is to consult an experienced medical malpractice lawyer and let him or her analyze your case.
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