It can be unsettling heading to a doctor when you are sick. You might be worried about certain symptoms in your child or yourself and might be afraid of what the doctor tells you. It's even more frightening when that doctor or medical professional makes a mistake or there is some error in your treatment that leads to serious or permanent injury.

What medical errors can lead to a potential medical malpractice lawsuit?

Inexperienced Staff Members

If you don't have a family doctor and must use a medical clinic, for example, you might not really know much about the staff that is there. The same can be true of finding a new family doctor that you don't know much about. Medical errors can occur when the office employs inexperienced staff that are not being monitored until they learn their job more effectively.

This can include new nurses that have only just graduated recently and don't have much real-world experience. It can also include receptionists who are still learning the system the doctor uses and therefore could mistakenly enter wrong data into your file. The doctor themselves that is treating you might be fairly new.

Any of these situations could potentially lead to errors in care and to a potential medical malpractice lawsuit.

Errors in Judgment

Even an experienced doctor can make mistakes, and those mistakes could be very costly to your health or those of your loved ones. Errors in judgment on the part of a doctor or nurse could lead to mistakes in your care or diagnosis.

If a doctor mistakes your symptoms or reads test results wrong, they could treat you for medical problems that you don't have which could either lead to new issues within your body or the original medical problem becoming worse.

They could also have an error in judgment about the type of treatment you might need—for example, if you were diagnosed with cancer and the doctor recommends chemotherapy or radiation treatments when surgery is the better course of action at that time. There is a possibility of damage done to your immune system when there didn't need to be. This could lead to a medical malpractice suit.

Dosing Errors

A very real possibility is a prescription dosing error. Your doctor might have mistakenly prescribed the wrong medication to you—you could be allergic to certain medications, and this could be a very serious error. Or they could have prescribed a too high of a dose to a certain painkiller, which could lead to organ damage and even addiction.

For additional information, contact a lawyer who offers medical malpractice law services.