What Constitutes Medical Malpractice?

Doctors are often seen as authority figures. After all, they spend the better part of a decade studying for their medical degrees and training in hospitals to hone their skills. If you show them your hand, they can tell you every bone, muscle, ligament, joint and nerve that comprise it. Since they specialize in the inner workings of the human body, they are experts at treating the various ailments that afflict it.

No matter how highly patients may think of them, doctors are still human and are not infallible. In fact, there are 15,000 to 19,000 cases of medical malpractice filed each year. However, if an injection feels slightly more painful than usual, that’s not necessarily grounds for a malpractice suit. Doctors can only be charged with malpractice if they were negligent of their duties, giving substandard treatment that harms, injures or causes death to patients.

In other words, deviation from the standard quality of care must first be established before the doctor can be held legally responsible for any harm caused to a patient. In such cases, a medical malpractice expert witness can study a plaintiff’s complaint to see if there is indeed professional negligence on the part of the doctor. Often, an expert witness’s opinion is necessary before a malpractice lawsuit can be filed.

Getting a Witness in a Medical Malpractice Case

Before any healthcare professional begins his medical practice, he must swear by the Hippocratic Oath, which is widely believed to have been written by Hippocrates, the Father of Western Medicine. With this oath, all medical practitioners promise that they will provide quality medical treatment to their patients fairly and honesty, and swear to do no harm. Unfortunately, quality healthcare is not assured 100 percent of the time.

A doctor whose failure to perform quality treatment on a patient results in worsening of the latter's condition could find could be due to a number of different causes, including negligence. In U.S. medical history, perhaps one of the most prominent cases of medical malpractice involved a blood type O 17-year-old girl who underwent a heart and double-lung transplant from a blood type A donor—clearly it was a fatal mistake that could have been avoided had the medical practitioners done their job.

However, to establish that a doctor or physician had committed an error, it is important for the patient's loved ones to engage the services of a medical malpractice witness. A medical malpractice witness can provide technical information in the medical malpractice case that an ordinary lawyer cannot, no matter how hard he works. With valuable testimony from a medical expert, a judge is likely to dismiss the case.