Medicine is obviously a highly complex field. It deals with difficult, life and death situations, and sometimes, tragedies happen. Quite often, these tragedies are no one’s “fault-” a medical provider did everything right, and something out of his or her control happened.
The law recognizes this. As such, a bad outcome, no matter how tragic, is not automatically presumed to be a case of medical malpractice. You don’t have a case simply because something bad happened to you during a procedure.
Instead, medical malpractice law operates according to so-called “standards of care.” Defined simply, a standard of care is an accepted treatment or diagnostic routine that a reasonable provider could be expected to adhere to in a given set of circumstances.
For example, if you come to your doctor complaining of severe abdominal pains and shortness of breath, there is a certain standard of care for diagnosing the cause of those symptoms. If the doctor adheres to that standard, he or she is usually in the clear legally, even if they’re not able to discover the condition afflicting you.
By contrast, if the doctor does not follow the standard of care and instead attempts to diagnose you in a fashion that is not recognized by the medical community, he or she might in danger of a medical malpractice action should he or she fail to discover what’s wrong with you and you suffer significant harm as a result.