Over 125 years of
Combined Experience
Get MY Free Consultation

No Fees Until You Get Paid

What Is Informed Consent?

Share

When visiting your healthcare provider, the last thing you expect is for them to cause you further injury or illness. Unfortunately, when healthcare providers make mistakes, they can seriously harm their patients. What’s worse is when they try to hide their mistakes instead of being honest and holding themselves accountable. 

One of the most common ways healthcare workers disguise their errors involves the patient’s own informed consent. Below, we go into further detail about what informed consent is, how you can go about proving medical malpractice in cases where informed consent is involved, and how a dedicated medical malpractice lawyer can be vital to succeed in your claim.

What You Need to Know About Informed Consent

Before you can be treated by a healthcare provider, you need to give your informed consent. This means your healthcare provider needs to provide you with information about the treatment, its risks, and side effects you might experience. If your healthcare provider does not obtain your informed consent, they do not have permission to treat you. 

But obtaining a patient’s informed consent is not usually the issue. The trouble lies with medical mistakes being masked as side effects or risks of treatment. If a medical professional makes a mistake and then tries to pass off the consequences of that mistake, they can be held accountable in civil court. 

Proving Medical Malpractice

Many victims of medical malpractice don’t even realize that they have been wronged until their injuries become life-threatening. At that point the truth will often be revealed. Any time a healthcare provider breaches the medical standard of care, a case for medical malpractice can be made.

Not all mistakes will constitute malpractice, but if another reasonable healthcare provider would not have made the same error, malpractice would be clear. 

Contact a Medical Malpractice Lawyer in Baton Rouge

If your healthcare provider failed to obtain your informed consent before treatment, or if a medical mistake has been disguised as a side effect or risk of a treatment, you may have grounds for a medical malpractice lawsuit. 

Find out what your legal options might be when you schedule a no-cost, risk-free claim evaluation with a dedicated Baton Rouge medical malpractice lawyer at Spencer Calahan Injury Lawyers. Give our office a call at 225-387-2323 or complete our quick contact form to get started on your case as soon as today.