Physicians, nurses, and other healthcare providers spend years studying and training to get the knowledge, insights, and skills needed to understand and treat human illnesses and injuries. We rely on these professionals to fix what’s broken and heal us when we are sick; we quite literally put our lives in their hands. While we know that medicine doesn’t have all the answers and that some diseases or injuries may not heal, we have every right to expect that the doctors who treat us do so with the appropriate standard of care.
But doctors don’t always take the steps they should. They may miss clear signs of a problem or recommend an inappropriate course of treatment. They may make avoidable errors because of inattention or carelessness. Quite simply, doctors can and do make mistakes on a shockingly frequent basis, and those mistakes are often catastrophic.
Medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States, killing almost 250,000 Americans every year according to a 2016 Johns Hopkins University study. Only heart disease and cancer take more lives than medical malpractice.
When a patient experiences health problems or dies because of medical malpractice, victims and their families may not even know that a doctor’s negligence was the cause. Medicine is complicated, and without trained medical professionals providing honest insights as to what happened, it can be difficult if not impossible to find the truth. Without the help of knowledgeable and committed medical malpractice attorneys who understand the nuanced legal issues involved in such cases, it can be even harder to hold negligent doctors accountable for the damage they caused.
