Medical Malpractice

The medical malpractice attorneys at Smith, Gildea & Schmidt, LLC fight vigorously to protect the rights of those injured by the negligence of doctors and other medical staff. Medical malpractice can occur in a number of different ways, including a doctor’s:

• failure to properly diagnose or treat medical conditions;
• failure to properly monitor a patient for a condition;
• failure to use proper tools during medical procedures;
• improper prescription of medication.

In order to prevail in medical malpractice litigation, attorneys must first establish what the “standard of care” is. Depending on the circumstances surrounding your injury, that means your medical malpractice attorneys need to prove what a competent and prudent doctor would have done when treating a patient similar to you. For example, if you were accusing a doctor of amputating the wrong leg, the standard of care would be fairly straightforward – competent and prudent doctors should operate on the correct limbs.

However, medical malpractice can become very complicated since injuries are rarely that straightforward. The law requires that experts be used to show what the standard of care is and to give the opinion that a particular doctor “breached” that standard of care by providing medical treatment that fell below the standard of care.

Medical malpractice attorneys must also show that a doctor’s breach of the standard of care caused some kind of injury to the patient. For example, a doctor could be negligent by misdiagnosing a patient with the wrong disease, but if the correct diagnosis had no treatment options anyway and the patient would have died either way, there likely would be no “causation.” That means that, while the doctor may have been negligent, the doctor’s negligence was not the cause of the injury and did not matter.

The medical malpractice attorneys at Smith, Gildea & Schmidt, LLC have successfully represented victims of medical malpractice who were injured when:

• a patient woke from anesthesia following a cardiac ablation procedure with a torn rotator cuff and nothing in the medical records described anything unusual happening that would explain the injury;
• a patient became blind after her doctor over-prescribed a medication called Plaquenil for over 15 years and failed to properly monitor her eyesight for changes in her vision;
• a patient suffered through a failed tooth extraction for several hours as the doctor chose to operate despite not having the proper tools available; and
• a patient in a rehabilitation center was allowed to develop a Stage III pressure ulcer before anyone noticed that there was an injury in the first place.

Often times proving the elements of medical malpractice requires reviewing medical journals and literature to stay up to speed on advances in medical science. The medical malpractice attorneys at Smith, Gildea & Schmidt, LLC have the experience and knowledge necessary to fight on behalf of victims of medical malpractice.