Medical Malpractice

San Diego Medical Malpractice Lawyer And
Medical Malpractice Case Overview

Medical malpractice claims arise when physicians, health care facilities or certain other types of health care professionals fail to do what a reasonably competent person of their category of medical expertise in their community would do under the circumstances presented by your medical condition.

Medical malpractice can take many forms. Examples of medical malpractice can include failure to properly and timely diagnose an illness or medical condition, or failure to properly treat an illness or medical condition. Medical Malpractice can as well include a failure to properly prescribe medication, a failure to properly and thoroughly advise you as to the risks of a medical treatment or medical procedure, a failure to properly treat a medical condition. Often times, a medical malpractice claim is actually some combination of these things. Medical malpractice requires more than just a mistake on the part of the doctors or other health care professionals. Your San Diego medical malpractice lawyer must be able to identify how the medical malpractice caused harm or damage to you. In many instances, your malpractice lawyer must be able to show that you would be better off had they done their job properly. This almost always requires testimony on your behalf from similar medical professionals.

Medical malpractice is a problem on the rise. Despite the efforts of the health care industry to depict the problem as one of runaway lawsuits rather than runaway poor health care, the statistics show that every patient is significantly at risk:

• One in five Americans have suffered from medical mistreatment either personally or as a family member of a victim.
• Medical malpractice accounts for a significant percentage of the more than 100,000 people who die and the 2 million who are disabled each year due to complications in medical care – figures that have more than quadrupled in the last 2 decades.
• 48,000 to 98,000 hospitalized Americans die each year due to preventable medical errors.
• 5 percent of U.S. doctors are responsible for 54 percent of all medical malpractice.
• According to the National Practitioner Databank, approximately 5,000 doctors nationwide have paid four or more medical malpractice judgments or settlements since 1990.
• For every medical malpractice claim filed, many go unreported, with patients in many large states reporting incidents of medical malpractice at the rate of less than 20%, leaving more than 80% of the medical malpractice which is actually occurring unreported.