San Antonio Attorneys For Victims Of Surgical Errors
Life-threatening medical mistakes can happen before, during and after surgical procedures. If you or a loved one has been harmed due to a surgical error, you may need an experienced medical malpractice attorney on your side to investigate exactly what happened and when.
Surgeons and hospitals are notorious for trying to hide behind consent forms and avoid responsibility when a surgery goes wrong. We may be able to help you hold the responsible parties accountable, and seek the medical care and financial compensation you need to move forward.
Please call us at 210-446-0035 or complete our contact form.
Wrong-Site Surgery And Other ‘Never’ Events
Some medical mistakes are so egregious that they have been categorized as “never” events, meaning they should never happen in a medical setting. However, despite the medical community’s increased focus on preventing “never” events, they still occur at alarming rates.
Wrong-site surgery — or operating on the wrong part of the body — is one type of “never” event, and it shocks people to learn that wrong-site surgery happens dozens of times each week in the United States.
The list of surgical “never” events also includes:
- Wrong implant or prosthesis
- Leaving a towel, scissors or other foreign object inside the patient
- Placing a device in the wrong patient
Unnecessary Surgeries
An unnecessary surgery occurs when a medical professional performs a surgical procedure that was not medically required. Unnecessary surgery exposes patients to unjustified surgical risks. Because surgeries are so lucrative for the medical industry, financial incentives are often the cause of these unnecessary surgeries, although they can also result from misdiagnosis or negligence. These unnecessary surgeries can be life-altering for patients, or even result in death.
We have proven success in taking unnecessary surgery cases to trial: Click here to see our case results. In one recent verdict, we took a pain medicine doctor to trial after he administered unnecessary pain injections to Tommy, our young police officer client. The pain injections administered by Dr. Tisdall caused our client to develop a serious infection that permanently disabled him from doing the police work that he loved. Although our client (who had two young daughters to support) was able to turn to teaching as a career, he took a drastic pay cut because he was required to change careers. He also suffers from daily permanent pain and can no longer engage in all of the physical activities that he loved. This verdict was included in the top 100 Medical Malpractice Verdicts in the United States.
Certain types of surgeries are more frequently involved in unnecessary surgery malpractice lawsuits. These include:
- Vascular stent placements (arteriograms or venograms with stenting) – Doctors Sound an Alarm Over Leg-Stent Surgery – WSJ
- Spinal surgeries (e.g., laminectomies, spinal fusions) – Unnecessary back surgeries cost Medicare $1.9B: Lown | Healthcare Dive
- Cardiac stent placements – ‘More dangerous than useful’: 1 in 5 coronary stents implanted by cardiologists are unnecessary, wasting $800M per year
- Hysterectomies – Georgia woman had unnecessary hysterectomy after lab mix-up and cancer misdiagnosis, lawsuit says
In other situations, healthcare providers may have more nefarious reasons for providing unnecessary surgeries, as in this case where more than 600 women who were subjected to medically unnecessary surgeries, including C-sections and hysterectomies, are suing a Virginia hospital and its top executives. The Ob/Gyn is already in prison:
Even if a surgical error is clearly due to medical malpractice, you can expect medical providers and their insurance companies to deny responsibility. Our attorneys can help to hold them responsible and make sure these errors don’t know unacknowledged.