• Brachial Plexus
• Cerebral Palsy
• Erb's Palsy
• Brain Damaged Babies 
• Failure to Diagnose
• Nursing Home Abuse

Medical malpractice is negligence by a health care provider. To be successful, the plaintiff must prove that the defendant failed to provide medical treatment in accordance with the community standard of care for physicians and hospitals.

In virtually all cases, proof that a defendant committed malpractice must come from a medical expert, and the selection of a qualified expert is often the key to winning or losing a case. Our philosophy in handling malpractice cases is to consult with the leading experts in their field and to handle only those cases where an expert has provided us with definitive proof of an error by the defendant.

The list of the types of malpractice cases is endless, but the following are the most common suits that we have handle:

– Failure to diagnose cancer. These types of cases can arise from the failure to properly read a diagnostic test, such as a mammogram which shows evidence of cancer, or the failure to recognize the signs and symptoms of cancer, such as skin cancer or ovarian cancer. To be successful, one must show not only a delay in diagnosing the cancer but also that the delay caused the cancer to grow or spread and caused some long-term problem that could have been avoided with proper care

– Birth errors, causing damage to the mother or child. Most often, these cases arise from the failure of the obstetrician to recognize signs of fetal distress during labor and to effectuate a prompt delivery by caesarean section. These types of failures can cause the baby to go without oxygen for a prolonged period of time, leading to permanent brain damage and Cerebral Palsy

– Erb’s Palsy. This is another type of birth injury we commonly handle, which involves injury to the nerves of a baby’s shoulder, causing impairment of their use of an arm or hand. In almost all cases, Erb’s Palsy is due to physician error in delivering the baby, through the placement of improper traction on the head during delivery

-- Vision problems from eye surgery. We have seen a sharp increase in the number of people who have had bad outcomes from LASIK eye surgery. In most of these cases, the patients were not proper candidates for LASIK. There are many conditions which disqualify a patient from having LASIK eye surgery, including thin corneas, large pupil size, keratoconus (steep corneas), and high myopia (extreme nearsightedness). However, the growing competition among eye doctors has led to a sharp decrease in the price of LASIK, and the only way doctors can make up for this lost revenue is by performing more and more LASIK procedures on patients who should have been rejected.

-- Medication errors. These types of cases can arise from a doctor prescribing the wrong medication, such as a case we recently settled where the doctor wrote out a prescription for the wrong chemotherapy drug for our client; or they can arise when a physician prescribes the proper drug but then fails to monitor the patient for side effects. A common example of this type of cases involves the use of blood thinners to prevent heart attack or stroke. These types of drugs must be strictly monitored to ensure the level of the drug in the patient’s blood remains in the proper range, and the failure to properly monitor can expose the patient to serious risks including stroke or death.

Note that the doctor is not liable just because there is a bad outcome in the care or treatment. It is necessary to show that a mistake caused the bad result. It is our skill to investigate a case to see if we can find that mistake. This generally involves intensive review of the medical records by a nurse on our staff followed by consultation with an expert knowledgeable in the field with whom we work.