How The Doctor Will Try To Blame You In Your Medical Malpractice Case

In virtually all malpractice cases, the doctor or hospital will try to blame the patient for the bad outcome.  The doctor will try to blame the patient by claiming that he didn’t get follow up medical treatment when he was supposed to.

Let’s say you visit the emergency room of a hospital with the sudden onset of severe chest pain. The ER doctor says nothing is wrong, does no testing and sends you home.  The discharge instructions read, “See your primary care doctor in one week.”

You leave the hospital feeling good that everything is fine and you don’t have anything to worry about.  One week later you’re feeling fine and you forget to see your primary care doctor.  A month later you have a massive heart attack that was caused by a blockage of your arteries leading to your heart (known as coronary artery disease).

How Your Doctor Will Try to Blame You

The ER doctor will try to blame you for the bad outcome.  The argument will be that you didn’t follow the doctor’s instructions to follow up with your primary care doctor and if you had done that, you would have gotten the treatment you needed and the heart attack would have been prevented.

This is the “blame the patient” defense. The doctor can’t justify his poor medical care, so he tries to blame you for failing to follow his instructions. The defense will argue that if you had only done what the doctor told you to do, the whole thing would have been prevented.

You can’t expect the doctor to admit any wrongdoing.  Even when the medical care is indefensible, the doctor will blame you.

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