Whether you’re going to your family doctor for a regular checkup or seeking emergency care at a hospital, you should be able to expect that the medical professionals caring for you will pay attention to your symptoms and correctly identify any problems they need to address for you. Unfortunately, not every doctor can be trusted to do this with every patient, and their negligence sometimes has dire consequences for their patients.
As our experienced attorneys know, filing suit over a doctor not diagnosing you correctly or at all can be complicated, even by the usual standards of medical malpractice lawsuits. If you want the best possible chance of getting the best result from a case like this, you want to seek help from a Norristown failure to diagnose lawyer who’s pursued and won claims like yours in the past.
When Does a Missed Diagnosis Count as Malpractice?
It’s important to understand that a doctor failing to identify what injury or illness you’re dealing with on the first, second, third, or even multiple attempts doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve committed malpractice. Healthcare is complex, and two patients can respond very differently when dealing with the same medical problems. Doctors aren’t expected to be perfect with every diagnosis, nor are they always civilly liable for negative outcomes experienced by their patients.
Instead, they’re expected to meet the same standard of care that any doctor with the same level of knowledge and experience would have provided under the same circumstances. If you want to sue a doctor over a failure to diagnose your injury or illness in Norristown, you and your attorney need to prove that the opportunities that doctor had to examine you and the information they got from those examinations should’ve been enough for any reasonably qualified doctor to correctly diagnose you. Our attorneys can provide crucial help with establishing this during your claim.
Meeting the Certificate of Merit Requirement
Another legal roadblock you have to navigate around while suing over harm caused by a missed diagnosis is the certificate of merit requirement. This requirement prevents people from filing baseless lawsuits against doctors by making them get support from other medical professionals before they’re allowed to sue for malpractice.
Your failure to diagnose lawyer in Norristown will help you understand and comply with this requirement while building your lawsuit or settlement proposal. This process will require you to get in touch with at least one medical expert with experience practicing medicine in the same area as the doctor you’re suing. You then need to have your expert review all the evidence relevant to your case, and if they agree that you have valid grounds to sue, they write and sign a certificate of merit that you present to a judge when you formally file suit.
Consider Working with a Norristown Failure to Diagnose Attorney
Both minor and major medical problems can get worse much more quickly than you might expect if they’re not identified and treated as quickly as possible after they first occur. When it comes to something like cancer, a delay in diagnosis and treatment of even a few days can have life-threatening consequences.
If you’ve been harmed by this type of medical malpractice, you have support available from a Norristown failure to diagnose lawyer with understanding and enforcing your right to civil recovery. Call Ostroff Godshall Injury and Accident Lawyers today to get started on your potential claim.
