Injury and illness are maladies for which many are unprepared. They often come at unexpected times and can easily wreak havoc on a person's life. And when they do, the first instinct of many is to turn to a professional care physician for immediate medical attention and, ideally, a prompt return to health. Unfortunately, medical recovery does not always result from the trust you put into a doctor's ability to address your health issues. In fact, sometimes just the opposite is true. When a doctor, nurse, attending physician, surgeon, dentist, or even a psychiatrist fails to address your medical needs in the proper way, whether through negligent oversight, inattention, etc. the pain and suffering can actually intensify. Cases of medical malpractice can take shape in many forms, but overall, these are behaviors that exhibit a failure to attend to a patient's medical needs.

All professionals in the medical field are held to a high standard of care; one that requires complete attention and focus on the patient in order to ensure that the best possible treatment is provided to those in need. It is when this standard of care is not lived up to by health care professionals that medical malpractice claims can be made. Generally, these issues take shape through misdiagnosis of an injury or illness, mistreatment of an injury or illness, surgical mistakes, and medical errors. Any symptoms of illness or development of physical injury complications that are amplified as a direct result of the way in which a medical professional chose to address a patient's afflictions should be immediately identified as medical malpractice.

If you believe that your current health affliction was not made better, but worse, by a medical professional then you have every right to legally address the issue. Along with misdiagnoses, wrongful treatments, and in-house medical errors, you could be subjected to other types of medical malpractice behaviors as well. Not only is the misdiagnosis of an illness a crucial oversight of the physician responsible, so too is a late diagnosis. Even if the conditions of a person's health are correctly identified if they are made too late in the game, the consequences could be equally as catastrophic. It is the responsibility of doctors and medical staff to take every precaution when meeting with a patient, even if just for a check-up. This means that minor symptoms which could be easily passed off by a busy physician should be taken as major warning signs. Failure to do so could result in late diagnosis of a disease which could have been tended to – sometimes even prevented – by a doctor on his toes.

While the above descriptions speak in generalities concerning medical malpractice, these cases will need to get quite specific when brought to the legal arena. It is easy to claim that a misdiagnosis led to a doctor's wrongful treatment of your condition. However, this is broad language-speak that is used for the primary purpose of making a medical malpractice claim. In order to truly make a case for your injury or illness, it will be necessary to back your claim with specific facts that detail the way in which your case is truly one of medical error. For example, it will be necessary to prove that your Deep Vein Thrombosis was mistakenly identified as a strained muscle by the doctor that you made aware of your pain and swelling. A misdiagnosis case can be made more compelling by delving deeper into the issue; by identifying the actual nature of the problem and exactly what went wrong, you are doing just that. Moving away from the general problem to discuss the true diagnostics of the case will not move you further away from a malpractice claim. Actually, it will help you move closer to it. Although you may no longer be addressing the main claim (misdiagnosis and mistreatment) you are giving cause to the claim – a crucial element of the process.

Again, it is important to reiterate the fact that all medical professionals are held to a high standard of care and it is expected that they will live up to it. Failure to provide patients with undivided attention, adequate care practices, comprehensive treatment plans, and the like is an easy way to go down a bad path – for the doctor, and especially for the patient. These are key issues that represent negligence, inattention, and a general disregard for the safety and health of others; components that should never be associated with a medical physician. If you have suffered unduly due to a professional's behavior of this sort, then it is safe to assume that you have been the victim of medical malpractice. No doctor can ethically practice negligence, and no doctor will be legally allowed to get away with it. You owe it to yourself and the many others who have suffered from medical malpractice to take legal action.