In Medical Malpractice Cases Is Misdiagnosis A Valid Point?

The truth is that a significant number of medical malpractice cases tend to derive from either delayed diagnosis or from a misdiagnosis of a certain medical condition, injury or illness. When a doctor’s mistake leads to a treatment which is incorrect, delayed or skipped entirely, the condition of the patient can get a lot worse a lot quicker and the patient might even die. With this being said, a diagnosis error itself, however, is not enough on its own to provide legal merits for a medical malpractice lawsuit.

Proving Medical Malpractice based on a diagnostic error

Now, you should be aware of the fact that the law doesn’t hold the doctor legally liable for all of the errors that he does while doing diagnosis. Instead, patients must usually prove a combination of three different things in order to be successful in a medical malpractice lawsuit. With this in mind, the things which need proving are:

·         The relationship between the doctor and the patient actually existed

·         The doctor was negligent

·         The doctor’s negligence was the cause of the injury to the patient

The majority of the cases of this character would usually hinge on either the second or the second element of the entire compound of things which needed to be proved.

Was the doctor actually negligent?

With this being asked, it’s critical to understand that a misdiagnosis or delayed diagnosis, for that matter, alone can’t be evidence of negligence. Skilled doctors are capable of making mistakes when putting diagnosis even when they exercise more than just reasonable care. The key in situations of the kind is to actually determine whether the doctor acted with competence which means that it’s important to see what the doctor did and didn’t do in order to arrive to the diagnosis. This means that you need to look at the differential diagnosis method which was employed in order to reach the conclusive diagnosis.

The criterion which has to be taken into consideration here is the amount of reasonable care. This means that if another doctor with the same skill set in the same situation under the same circumstances would have handled the diagnosis in a way which would have led to the damages sustained by the patient, then we have a case of malpractice. And that is why you need a lawyer to represent your rights and help you get justice.

Differential diagnosis requires a thorough break down of all the possible conditions which the patient might be suffering from based on the symptoms that are being incurred. If the doctor hadn’t included the correct diagnosis on the differential diagnosis list and another doctor would have included it, then we can speak about medical malpractice. This is a very complicated field of personal injury law and it requires significant experience to be dealt with.  That is why it is important to work with an experienced law firm.