Orlando Medical Malpractice Attorneys

Medical malpractice is when a medical professional breaches their duty of care for their patient, leading to harm and financial loss. Doctors have a code of professional ethics they must adhere to, but greed, understaffing, or bias can cause the physician to deviate from what the American Medical Association expects.

A breach of duty of care can take several forms.

Misdiagnosis

Misdiagnosis is when you’re diagnosed with a medical condition you don’t have or not diagnosed with the condition you do have. It can also occur when you have a disease, but the doctor determines that you don’t have any type of concerning medical condition.

Misdiagnosis crosses into malpractice when your condition worsens because you didn’t receive the treatment you needed for the disease. Malpractice can also happen if you’re diagnosed with a condition you don’t actually have and so undergo unnecessary, painful, and invasive medical procedures.

Delayed diagnosis

A delayed diagnosis is just what it sounds like – a physician fails to diagnose a condition and instead tells you that you don’t have an illness when you do. The delay between your initial misdiagnosis and getting an accurate diagnosis could mean you miss the opportunity for early intervention that could have given you a better prognosis.

It can happen if a doctor fails to order the proper scans or tests or misinterprets the information presented by your lab tests or imaging. Delay in the diagnosis and treatment of caner can be actionable if the delay negatively impacts the outcome.

Negligent failure to treat

This could happen if a doctor has too many patients or doesn’t take the time to properly evaluate a patient. It may be common in emergency rooms, especially in facilities with staffing shortages. Or, it could happen if a doctor fails to refer a patient to a specialist or fails to recommend the proper follow-up treatments.

Surgical malpractice

Even carefully planned surgery carries a risk. If you need emergency surgery, the chaos can increase the risk of a dangerous mistake.

Some common surgical mistakes that could be considered malpractice include:

• Surgery on the wrong patient
• Wrong site surgery
• Performing an incorrect procedure
• Unnecessary surgery
• Damaging tissue or other organs during surgery
• Leaving an instrument or supplies inside a patient
• Using unsterile tools or equipment
• Too much or too little anesthesia

Birth injuries

A birth injury is devastating. What should be the happiest day of your life instead becomes a nightmare. An inexperienced doctor, an emergency that arises during delivery – so many things can go wrong during delivery.

Birth injury is any error during labor or delivery that harms the mother or child. This can include failure to perform a C-section, problems using forceps, or failure to detect fetal distress. In some cases, your baby could be left permanently brain-damaged or disabled. Worst-case scenarios lead to the death of the mother, her child, or both.

Poor follow-up/aftercare

After being diagnosed with an illness or after a medical procedure, you must follow certain steps to ensure a healthy recovery. Many of us aren’t sure what we can and cannot do after treatment, from physical activity to even what we should eat! That’s why we rely on easy-to-follow aftercare instructions and need access to our doctor in case we have questions, or a medical concern arises.

If a doctor fails to provide appropriate follow-up or aftercare instructions, then you may not make a full recovery. Or, if you don’t receive the right post-surgical care, they could risk infection or damage to the injured area.