When you are sick or injured you go to a doctor with the expectation that the doctor will heal you. Unfortunately, the opposite sometimes happens – the doctor actually makes you sick or causes you injury. When that occurs, you may ask “Can I sue my doctor?” The simple answer to that question is “yes”, you can sue your doctor. Whether or not the lawsuit will be successful depends on a number of factors.

With good reason, those in the healthcare industry are held to a high standard of care. When that standard of care is breached, and a patient suffers as a result, the doctor (or other healthcare provider) can be held legally accountable for the damages suffered by the victim. Though most doctors are conscientious, hard working professionals, medical errors still occur at an alarming rate. Some of the more common medical errors include:

• Surgical errors –operating on the wrong body part, leaving foreign objects inside the surgical site, failing to operate, operating on the wrong patient, causing infection at the surgical site.
• Anesthesia errors – giving a patient too much or too little anesthesia, failing to recognize and anesthesia adverse reaction
• Diagnosis errors – failing to diagnose, misdiagnoses, diagnosing the wrong disease/condition
• Prescription errors –wrong dosage, prescribing a drug that is contraindicated, filling with the wrong drug
• Treatment errors –failing to follow-up, not treating in time (ER)

If you or a loved one believe that a medical error has been committed, and you have suffered injuries as a result of the error, it is best to consult with an experienced Flint medical malpractice attorney as soon as possible. It is possible to file a lawsuit against a doctor based on a medical error; however, medical malpractice law is a highly specialized area of the law that can be very complicated to navigate. Not all errors amount to medical malpractice, for example. Doctors are human, meaning they make honest mistakes. For the error to be considered malpractice, the treatment provided by the doctor must fall below the accepted standard of care generally provided by the medical community. In other words, a doctor’s actions are judged by those of other doctors in similar circumstances. Only an experienced medical malpractice attorney can evaluate the facts and circumstances surrounding the error and determine if the error reaches the threshold necessary to form the basis of a medical malpractice lawsuit.