When Television Medical Drama Becomes a Real-Life Issue

If you’re a fan of medical dramas, then it’s almost guaranteed that you’ve seen instances of medical malpractice, whether a doctor fails to correctly diagnose a patient’s symptoms, exposes a patient to unsterile conditions during surgery, or fails to address a patient’s concerns altogether. While watching shows like these, we often find ourselves rooting for the doctors, not understanding how these patients could ever fail to forgive someone with such a charming smile and perfect jawline. Of course, once we’re in the same position, all of that melts away, and we understand what kind of horror these seemingly little mistakes can turn out to be. Medical malpractice is an alarmingly serious issue in the United States with medical errors accounting for nearly 100,000 deaths each year, making up almost 10% of the annual deaths.

Doctor Dreamboat Wouldn’t Listen

Nearly 50% of Americans are plagued by nosocomephobia, which is better known as the fear of hospitals, and it seems that every single person in this percentage ends up walking through the doors of the television hospital, and the majority of them don’t end up leaving. This is not very comforting to the real-life 50% who are letting their symptoms continue to get worse because they’re too afraid to go to the hospital after spending an evening binging episodes where medical practices are wildly dramatized and a shockingly low number of patients survive their treatments and surgeries.

It doesn’t help make matters any better when real-life doctors completely disregard their patient’s concerns over their symptoms, giving them an iv and a Tylenol and sending them home if enough of their tests come back without too much evidence for concern. Some doctors won’t even do this much, ignoring their patients altogether because they believe that their medical training means more than the patient’s knowledge and instincts regarding their own body. Too often, this arrogance leads to the patient being made to bear serious consequences: symptoms can worsen, babies are delivered in cars on the drive back home from the hospital, and in some cases, a patient will die soon after their visit because they didn’t receive proper treatment after a doctor failed to recognize the early warning signs of a heart attack or a stroke. When doctors remove the human element from healthcare it can cause a situation to become fatal.

Doctor Dreamboat Dropped the Ball

Imagine you’ve finally gained the courage to go to Northwest Community hospital to seek treatment for your symptoms and you haven’t been turned away. Instead, your concerns were addressed and tests were conducted to finally give you a diagnosis for the pain you’ve been experiencing. What a great feeling, right? Now imagine that that diagnosis you got isn’t yours, but instead belongs to a patient down the hall. This might sound absurd, but misdiagnoses are one of the most common issues in medical malpractice lawsuits.

Misdiagnoses are dangerous for a few reasons, the first being that the medication you were prescribed is not the medicine that you should be taking. In some cases, this isn’t necessarily a big deal, but depending on what the medication is, you could be experiencing serious symptoms with no benefit to your condition. Taking the wrong medication can make you sick and make it more difficult for your body to fight off other infections. This means that taking the wrong medication could worsen your ability to manage your condition.

If you weren’t prescribed medication but were still given the wrong diagnoses, you won’t be experiencing any strange side effects, but your condition will likely continue to worsen since it is going untreated. In some cases, if a medical condition goes too long without being treated the damage becomes irreversible or it gets to a point where it can no longer be cured and will lead to a patient’s death.

Doctor Dreamboat Must Pay

If you experienced any unnecessary pain or suffering as a result of the negligence of a medical professional, then you could be owed financial compensation for your trouble. You must find a medical malpractice lawyer who will fight for what you are entitled to and will be in your corner supporting you through every step of the process. At first, you might feel a bit guilty about pursuing a medical malpractice lawsuit. The defense might try to convince you that you’re overreacting over a small mistake, a momentary lapse of judgment. You have to stay strong and remember that you are not the only one who benefits from a medical malpractice lawsuit. The doctor needs to be held accountable so that they do not make the same mistakes with any other patient.

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