When you go to a doctor for receiving medical care, you fill out certain forms, and the doctor will ask you about your medical history. You need to be very honest about your medical history and tell the doctor what exactly happened to you in the past.
When you go to a doctor for receiving medical care, you fill out certain forms, and the doctor will ask you about your medical history. You need to be very honest about your medical history and tell the doctor what exactly happened to you in the past.
The Defense will Scour Your Medical Records
Now when you have suffered an injury because of someone’s carelessness, whether it is due to negligence of a doctor or another driver, you decide to file a personal injury lawsuit, seeking compensation for the harms and losses you have suffered. Once you have filed the lawsuit, the defense attorneys are going to scour your medical records to look and see what your medical history is. They are going to see if there is anything inconsistent about your medical past.
They will investigate whether or not you informed your doctor about certain aspects of your medical past.
Common Defense that Doctors Adopt
One of the common defenses doctors like to use is that the patients did not tell them about the particular problems they had in their past. Since the doctors did not know about the particular problem, they could not actively treat or plan for them. Alternatively, doctors can also say that the past problem could considerably increase the risk of certain disease, and since they did not know about this past issue, they were unable to diagnose the disease in time or even consider it.
Your past medical problems can play a significant role in your present health issues. Therefore, a doctor can always turn around and say that since he did not know about your past medical history, he was unable to provide the right medical care to you, and based on this rationale the violation of basic standards of medical care that you are claiming cannot be true.
Therefore, when you have an appointment for medical care and treatment, you need to be straightforward and honest with your doctor, so that he can make the best decision for you in terms of how to manage this issue and what is the best avenue to take. When a doctor is treating you, he must consider your past medical history, along with your present symptoms to provide a sound treatment plan.
Easily Deflecting Blame
In fact, it is the duty of the doctor to ask you about your past health problems, and if you hide something or inadvertently forget to mention your past medical problem, the doctor cannot be held liable if something goes wrong with his prescribed treatment. If you still go ahead with a medical malpractice case, the doctor can easily present a strong defense and claim that you had not revealed a very important fact that would have made him change the treatment.
Therefore, it is critical to reveal your past medical problem to your doctor. When you have done this, the doctor will not have any genuine excuse about providing the wrong treatment or coming to the wrong diagnosis.
