When you are admitted to a hospital, you expect that the treatment you receive there will improve your health. But all too often, this is not the case.
Entrusting your health to a medical facility and its staff is, essentially, entering into a contract—a contract wherein the hospital pledges to treat you with a professional standard of care. If the hospital and its staff are negligent, and you suffer injury, then they have broken their contract with you and can be held liable for medical malpractice. Read the rest »
While the term “nightmare superbug” may seem melodramatic, it is how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) described the danger of antibiotic-resistant bacteria spreading throughout the country. Right now, most resistant pathogens are not exceedingly dangerous in and of themselves, but they have the ability to spread resistance to other bacteria and viruses that can be far more deadly. 
Surgery is intended to cure patients, or alleviate their suffering. Unfortunately, there are incidences where negligence on the part of a medical professional or a hospital can cause a patient’s condition to worsen. One of the ways this can happen is when the site where the procedure was performed becomes 
Imagine having cosmetic surgery, then, to your surprise, seeing footage of that surgery broadcast on YouTube—without your consent. What’s worse, the doctor performing the surgery is dancing and rapping at the same time.
When someone undergoes surgery, he is putting his life and his health in the hands of a surgical team. Though we should be able to trust these medical professionals to take the utmost care throughout the procedure, if they fail to do so and a patient suffers injury, they can be held accountable. 
Medical students take their first steps as interns each July, by beginning work at teaching hospitals all across the country. As with many other cities, Atlanta, Georgia, has a number of these institutions. Interns at teaching hospitals have very little experience in diagnosing and treating the illnesses and injuries of their new patients. This has become the basis of a long-standing joke among professionals in the medical field. “Don’t get sick in July,” you may hear a seasoned doctor say in good humor, but are there serious threats to patients being treated by inexperienced medical interns? 
You’ve heard that a nasty bug is traveling through Atlanta, and one day you wake up and it hits you: fever, headache, nausea, and loss of appetite. You call in sick and head to the doctor, even though you have a hunch on what the problem is. The doctor and staff check you out and diagnose you with what you suspected you had all along: the flu. The doctor tells you to get plenty of rest and drink lots of fluids. You then slouch home, crawl into bed next to a gallon of water, and wait for the bug to take its course.
You’ve heard the horror stories, and unfortunately, they are true:
One of the more harmful things that can happen during surgery is for the surgeon and/or surgical team to leave a foreign object inside your body. These Retained Surgical Items (RSIs) can result in additional surgical procedures, internal obstructions, abscesses, visceral perforations, intestinal fistulas, and in some cases, death.