South Carolina Medical Malpractice Attorney

People go to the hospital, urgent care clinic, doctor’s office, or another healthcare facility in hopes of getting better. Unfortunately, too many people in South Carolina end up getting worse due to medical errors and other forms of medical malpractice necessitating a medical negligence law firm.

In fact, preventable cases of medical negligence take the lives of nearly 100,000 Americans each year, according to several studies, and roughly one million people suffer some form of injury due to medical malpractice. Many more cases go unreported. To put those figures in context, about 34,000 people die in car crashes each year. That is why a medical injury lawyer is needed.

If you believe that you or a loved one was injured because of medical malpractice, it is important that you talk to a South Carolina medical malpractice attorney. These cases are usually very technical and require sophisticated analysis and review of pages and pages of medical records.

Proving Medical Negligence in a South Carolina Medical Malpractice Claim

Once the medical standard of care for your particular case is established, our South Carolina medical malpractice lawyers will set out to show the court exactly how the standard of care was breached—or, in other words, how the doctor failed to meet the established standard of care when treating you. This is usually where the medical expert shines, as it is his or her ultimate duty to prove malpractice by walking the jury through your condition, the appropriate course of treatment, and what exactly your doctor did or did not do at each stage of care.

It is important to keep in mind that an error in treatment can have occurred despite the medical provider’s best efforts to meet the reasonable standard of care. For instance, the procedure that they were charged with performing may have been incredibly complex, with several known risks that were properly disclosed to you ahead of time. In an instance such as this, the medical provider cannot be charged with medical malpractice, as the occurrence of the error that caused your injury may have been greater than the likelihood of success.

Finally, it is not enough to prove that your doctor “made a mistake.” You will need to show the link between the mistake that your provider made and the injuries you sustained. The medical malpractice lawyers at Joye Law Firm evaluate the evidence surrounding your case, including your medical records and the doctor’s notes from each of your visits, to show that if it were not for the doctor’s error, you would not have suffered a worsening of your condition or any decline in health.

In some cases, the doctor’s error is directly responsible for additional health problems that require further attention and treatment; if this is your case, we will also work to show the courts the link between the error and your declining health.

In other instances, the health care provider’s error comes in the form of a failure to diagnose. This could be anything from exactly that – a failure to diagnose your condition – to a misdiagnosis. A failure to diagnose can lead to a missed window of opportunity for treatment, prescribing the wrong treatment, or failure to treat entirely.

In any of these instances, if your doctor’s negligence caused a worsening in your health, you are entitled to damages, which you can pursue via a medical malpractice claim.

Common Types of Medical Malpractice

Injuries due to medical malpractice can take many forms and can happen in almost any setting or context, including emergency rooms, operating rooms, doctor’s offices and more.

Some of the more common types of medical malpractice include:

• Surgical injuries. Some patients suffer injuries when a surgeon performs an operation on the wrong body part or even on the wrong patient. A recent report in the Archives of Surgery revealed that wrong-site or wrong-patient surgeries occur about 2,700 times per year. Surgical errors are still common even when the surgeon operates on the correct patient in the right place, particularly with laparoscopic and bariatric operations. Another common type of surgical error happens when sponges or other instruments are left inside the patient. Malpractice can also occur after surgery when medical personnel fail to properly monitor the patient and provide proper post-operative care.
• Anesthesia errors. Anesthesia is administered so that lifesaving procedures can be performed on patients about 40 million times per year. An anesthesiologist must carefully administer the anesthesia and monitor the patient’s vital signs throughout the operation. Brain injury, suffocation, paralysis, heart attack, coma and even death can result from mistakes in dosage and monitoring. In some instances, improper dosage can allow a patient to “wake up” during an operation, experiencing pain and distress.
• Medication errors. One of the most common forms of medical mistakes, medication errors cause a significant number of injuries and deaths each year. Illegible handwriting and confusing abbreviations sometimes result in medication errors, as can medical professionals’ failure to properly communicate with each other. Another issue is drugs that have similar sounding or appearing names.
• Failure to diagnose and treat in a timely manner. Failure to properly diagnose a serious condition early when the condition is still treatable leads to many preventable deaths each year. Commonly misdiagnosed illnesses include cancer, heart attacks, appendicitis, strokes and pulmonary embolisms. Sometimes diagnostic errors happen because doctors fail to spend enough time talking to patients about their symptoms, other times they are the result of bad communication among the medical personnel themselves.
• Labor and delivery. The birthing process is a dangerous time for both the baby and the mother, and medical mistakes can result in injuries or death for both. Medical personnel present at a birth have a duty to monitor the status of mother and child, and to act quickly when problems develop. If they are negligent, permanent injuries can occur that will affect the child’s life.
• Emergency room malpractice. South Carolina emergency room staffs can sometimes be overwhelmed with patients and become chaotic, inefficient and mistake-prone. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that nearly half of all medical malpractice-related deaths are from ER errors.