The Kickham Comment - Boston Accident Lawyer Blog
Thanks to a very effective and coordinated campaign by the medical liability insurance industry, a lot of people think that true cases of medical negligence, or medical malpractice, are rare. This is reflected in the relatively low rate of plaintiff’s verdicts in medical malpractice cases brought in Massachusetts courts. (“Plaintiff’s verdicts” are verdicts that find in favor of the plaintiff and against the hospital or doctor that committed the medical negligence alleged. In my more than twenty years’ of experience as a Massachusetts medical malpractice attorney and Massachusetts personal injury attorney, that is not true at all. Medical negligence occurs all the time – with alarming frequency. In my career as a Massachusetts medical malpractice lawyer, I have seen repeated cases of shocking medical negligence.
These cases have ranged from flagrant failures by doctors and nurses to diagnose an obvious disease process, to removing the wrong organ, to overall poor medical procedure. I have seen patients who presented to their doctor with obvious symptoms of a heart attack, told that they are suffering from indigestion, and later died from that heart attack. I’ve seen patients whose symptoms of cancer were misdiagnosed as benign, later die of that disease after too much time had passed, the cancer had spread and the patient lost the chance to treat that cancer, and died as a result.
Most people like to think that doctors – especially their doctors – are immune from fault – almost flawless. Of course, that’s not true. No professional is immune from fault or error. The truth is, nearly 100,000 patients die each year from medical errors. And that figure reflects only officially reported cases – many times that amount are never even reported at all, due to patients and their families either not possessing enough information to proceed ahead with a legal action, or by just being intimidated by the overall, complex healthcare industry. When medical negligence occurs, devastating results can follow – often ending in the death of a loved one. The lives of the victims of medical negligence, and their families, can be forever altered or destroyed.