Medical Malpractice Tips

The usual problem with emergency medicine is a missed diagnosis and the failure to call in a consultant. A patient with chest pain should have an electrocardiogram. If there is an index of suspicion of heart attack and even if the electrocardiogram is normal, the patient should be admitted to the hospital and observed in the coronary care unit with electrocardiogram monitoring. Under those circumstances, eighty percent of patients who arrive in a hospital with a heart attack leave alive. The major cause of death, in these cases, is an irregular beating action of the heart, an arrhythmia called ventricular fibrillation, which is treatable with drugs and electric shock.

Deep vein thrombosis (DVT) commonly affects the leg veins (such as the femoral vein or the popliteal vein) or the deep veins of the pelvis. Occasionally the veins of the arm are affected (if spontaneous, this is known as Paget-Schrötter disease). A DVT can occur without symptoms, but in many cases the affected extremity will be painful, swollen, red, warm and the superficial veins may be engorged.

The most serious complication of a DVT is that the clot could dislodge and travel to the lungs, which is called a pulmonary embolism (PE). DVT is a medical emergency; present in the lower extremity there is 3% chance of a PE killing the patient.

Obstetrical Cases:

Obstetrician: Whether or not the defendant is a general practitioner or an obstetrician, the standard of care is that of an obstetrician. That expert will testify to the proper standards of care, which were in effect at the time at that size hospital. He will discuss departures from the proper standard of care, if any, on the part of the doctor, nurses, and the hospital. In addition, many obstetricians would be comfortable in testifying to proximate causation. However, the proximate causation question is best handled by a pediatrician and/or pediatric neurologist.

Lung cancer: does the patient have cancer or is that scar tissue in the lung from tuberculosis or something else? The doctor has a duty to obtain any previous chest x-rays. If this is a "new lump" seen in the lung and the patient had a chest x-ray a year before and five years ago, which showed the same lump, it couldn't be cancer because it hasn't changed.