Can you sue a doctor for not treating your pain?

If a doctor provided you, the patient, with negligent medical care and that negligent medical care caused you to suffer physically, mentally, or emotionally, you are absolutely within your legal rights to sue the doctor and seek damages for pain and suffering.

Can you sue a doctor for emotional damage?

The short answer is “yes.” Courts have ruled that when a doctor causes emotional distress due to negligence, the patient can sue just as if the doctor caused physical harm.

What is failure to diagnose in the medical profession?

This phenomenon, known as “failure to diagnose” in the medical profession, can technically be a misdiagnosis, or a missed diagnosis. Doctors can be held legally liable for medical malpractice not only when they make an affirmative mistake, but also when they choose to do nothing in response to a patient reporting symptoms to them.

Should doctors tell patients about mistakes made by other doctors?

By some estimates, medical errors are one of the leading causes of death in the United States. Physicians often see the mistakes made by their peers, which puts them in a sticky ethical situation: Should they tell the patient about a mistake made by a different doctor? Too often they do not.

Do doctors give patients the silent treatment?

Many reported that they experienced the silent treatment from doctors after experiencing harm during medical care. The NEJM report stresses that patients come first and recommends that doctors should explore, not ignore, a colleague’s error.

Do doctors have an ethical duty to disclose mistakes?

There’s wide agreement in the medical community that doctors have an ethical duty to disclose their own errors to patients, Gallagher said. But there’s been less discussion about what physicians should do when they discover that someone else’s mistake. For the NEJM report, Gallagher led a team of 15 experts who discussed the problem.