I had surgery and then I got an infection. Can I sue the doctor who did my surgery?

Medical malpractice lawsuits can be difficult to litigate because you need to prove not just the fact that you had a negative outcome, but that the doctor made a mistake so severe that you ended up with extensive damages which you wouldn’t have had if the surgery was performed correctly. All surgeries come with a certain risk of infection, so it’s possible to develop complications even if the doctor did everything right.

There are some mistakes severe enough that you might have a case for malpractice. Some examples of these severe mistakes would be:

1. The doctor left a sponge or other surgical implement inside you, and the infection resulted from that.
2. The doctor used improperly sterilized tools, and you got a blood-borne illness like HIV or hepatitis as a result of the hospital’s negligence.
3. The doctor operated on the wrong body part or lied to you about your condition in order to perform surgery on a healthy body part that didn’t actually need surgery.
4. The doctor wrote the wrong prescription, and the medication you took harmed you.
5. The pharmacy gave you the wrong prescription, and you received a medication that harmed you instead of the medication that you were supposed to take.
6. You were given a defective medical device.

In some cases, malpractice is the result of a doctor not paying attention or taking steps the necessary steps to keep patients safe. In other cases, it’s a deliberate attempt to make money by performing unnecessary procedures. Sometimes the doctor believed that all precautions had been followed, but the hospital or the pharmacy made a mistake. Sometimes the problem was with a device manufactured by a company that’s not affiliated with the hospital or the doctor in any way.

Determining whether you have a case for medical malpractice can be tricky, and it’s often difficult for a patient to figure out who is at fault even if they know that they have a case. If you think that you have been injured by medical malpractice, it’s a good idea to speak with an experienced medical malpractice attorney.