Miami Emergency Room Malpractice and Misdiagnosis Lawyer:
Sean M. Cleary

In Miami and throughout Florida, failure to treat internal bleeding - bleeding that occurs inside the body - is among the most common forms of medical malpractice. Internal bleeding left untreated can lead to serious complications.

Internal bleeding may be caused by:

• Blunt force trauma, including motor vehicle accidents or assault
• Leaking or ruptured aneurysm
• Fractures
• Anticoagulation medications (blood thinners)
• Pregnancy, including miscarriage
• Blood loss during surgery

When someone is involved in a motor vehicle accident or suffers from painful symptoms, they are taken or arrive at a local ER. Internal bleeding is a medical emergency that should be treated as soon as possible. But in an ER setting, often, the complaints of patients are misread or ignored by the hospital staff. This can happen because internal bleeding is more difficult to recognize than external bleeding.

Less obvious causes left untreated can also result in internal bleeding. These include organ damage, gastritis, or a bleeding disorder.

When such a medical error occurs, the patient’s condition will continue to deteriorate. The patient may even be discharged too early, without getting treatment. Sometimes, diagnosis correction and treatment come too late. In such circumstances, the patient may suffer permanent damage, such as paralysis or even death and the hospital may be liable for medical negligence.

Internal bleeding may occur in the:

• Tissues: those that line the heart
• Organs: the brain or lungs
• Cavities: the abdomen, chest, or head
• Muscles
• Joints

Regardless of the underlying cause of internal bleeding, to prevent serious harm, doctors must treat this medical condition immediately.

If you, or a loved one, suffered a serious injury as a result of medical negligence involving internal bleeding, you have the right to seek compensation from those responsible. Contact the experienced Miami medical malpractice attorney at The Law Offices of Sean M. Cleary for a free consultation.

Hospitals, where infections are left untreated in their emergency departments, may be liable for injuries.

If you suffered a serious infection associated with treatment in the ER, it's important to determine whether any medical errors took place, such as:

• The nursing staff has not properly documented your symptoms
• A differential diagnosis was not performed
• Tests were not timely run to confirm the presence of an infection
• Treatment was not promptly begun with the correct choice of antibiotics
• A physician failed to refer the matter to a specialist

Diagnosing and treating an infection requires doctors and nurses to identify the signs and symptoms of infection, communicate, investigate with lab tests, and properly treat it. Prompt diagnosis and action are especially necessary to avoid or cure sepsis, a systemic blood-borne infection, which has a significant mortality rate.

When medical providers fail to diagnose or erroneously diagnose serious infections, these can quickly get worse, leading to serious injury or death. Victims or their surviving family members have the right to seek monetary compensation for the damages suffered.

At The Law Offices of Sean M. Cleary, our dedicated medical malpractice lawyer has been helping patients and families throughout Florida for over 20 years. Give us a call today for a free consultation.

If doctors neglected to diagnose and treat a condition that resulted in the loss of an arm or a leg, you have a right to be compensated.

The most common types of traumatic events that lead to amputation include:

• Severe motor vehicle accidents
• Workplace accidents
• Accidents, including home lawnmowers
• Firearm, fireworks, and explosives accidents
• Electrocution

When medical professionals act negligently and they're doing so results in the loss of a limb, there may be a case for medical malpractice. Examples of medical negligence that lead to loss of limb cases include, but are not limited to:

• Infection
• Using a contaminated medical device that causes infection
• Failing to treat blood clots and internal bleeding
• Failure to treat trauma
• Failure to diagnose
• Medication errors
• Amputating the wrong limb

If you, or a loved one, suffered an injury due to medical malpractice, you may be entitled to compensation for medical bills, rehabilitation expenses, lost wages, pain and suffering, loss of consortium, and other damages. Contact us today, Miami law requires you to file a lawsuit within two years of the injury.

5% of the people visiting the emergency department are there because of pain in their abdomen and as many as 10% of patients in the ED have a serious or life-threatening cause of pain or require surgery. Therefore, doctors, nurses, and staff members need to pay attention to give an accurate diagnosis that may even be life-saving. Abdominal pain can be challenging to diagnose:

• Sometimes a patient has pain in more than one area of the abdomen
• Women are at risk of genitourinary disease, which may cause abdominal pain
• The elderly may present with atypical symptoms of a disease

Studies show that failure to diagnose an illness at initial evaluation can lead to complications and surgery that initially may have been unnecessary. The location of the pain is the starting point for further evaluation. But evaluating abdominal pain requires an approach that relies on:

• Patient history
• Physical examination
• Laboratory tests
• Different imaging studies

Failure to Diagnose Appendicitis

Failure to diagnose appendicitis is too common and can have dangerous consequences. Appendicitis left untreated can cause peritonitis and sepsis. When faced with appendicitis symptoms, health care providers can make some common errors that include:

• Misdiagnosing appendicitis as kidney stones, colitis, or gastroenteritis
• Failing to conduct a proper exam to locate and measure the pain, including rectal examination
• Failing to consider appendicitis as a possible diagnosis
• Prescribing analgesia for undiagnosed abdominal pain or symptoms
• Failing to intervene surgically when there is a deterioration of the health
• Following up inadequately within 12 to 24 hours

Sometimes, an initial failure to diagnose can result in later errors or additional procedures, including follow-up surgeries with their attendant risks. Failure to diagnose correctly and medical errors may constitute medical malpractice.

Failure to Diagnose Bowel Obstruction

Doctors who are seeing a patient with signs and symptoms of bowel obstruction should act promptly because left untreated can result in perforation of the organ. Usually, the treatment is surgery to clear the obstruction. The consequences of bowel perforation may include sepsis. Sepsis, in turn, must be diagnosed and quickly treated because if it progresses, antibiotics may no longer be efficacious and the patient can die. Failure to correctly diagnose and treat bowel obstruction may constitute medical malpractice.

Failure to Diagnose Acute Pancreatitis

Pancreatitis is a disease in which the pancreas becomes inflamed. Acute pancreatitis is marked by stomach pain, increased heart rate, vomiting, fever, etc. Medical professionals are trained in detecting pancreatitis through physical exams and laboratory testing, but cases exist where the proper standards diagnostic protocols weren’t followed. Medical professionals can be held accountable for the harm suffered due to a failure to accurately diagnose, including the pain of undergoing procedures that weren’t necessary.

When patients report to the emergency room with indications of abdominal pain, they may suffer from other serious conditions that require immediate correct diagnosis, such as:

• Hernia
• Diverticulitis
• Intussusception
• Colorectal cancer
• Pancreatic cancer
• Ovarian cancer

Doctors are expected to notice the signs and symptoms of a serious condition but, oftentimes, they and the hospital staff miss the existence of intracranial bleeding in patients coming to the ER. A doctor’s failure to diagnose a health problem can cause an otherwise treatable issue to become a threat to the patient's life.

Hemorrhagic strokes are rare but can be very dangerous. A stroke can occur when a blood vessel in the brain bursts or ruptures. Given the severity of the stroke, doctors must work quickly and skillfully. That is not always what happens, unfortunately.

Hemorrhagic strokes are associated with two main causes:

• Aneurysms. This is caused by a weakened blood vessel that ruptures. An aneurysm must be accurately diagnosed by physicians by performing appropriate X-rays or CT scans. Doctors commonly misdiagnose aneurysm symptoms, leaving the aneurysm unchecked and untreated.
• Arteriovenous Malformation (AVM). This is caused by the formation of a cluster of abnormally shaped blood vessels. When one burst, it causes cerebral bleeding.

Internal bleeding is commonly treated by lowering a patient’s blood pressure. Usually, the patient is given drugs, but when they don't work, doctors perform surgery. However, surgery can be dangerous. If not performed with the appropriate care and precision, the patient can be injured for life.

Failure to correctly diagnose a stroke or an aneurysm in time could result in severe complications that lead to surgery or require other procedures that, otherwise, may not have been necessary. In the worst-case scenario, undiagnosed intracranial bleeding can lead to death.

If you, or a family member, have been wrongfully discharged from the hospital through emergency room error, doctor mistake, or other negligence, we can help you hold the medical professionals accountable for their failure to diagnose intracranial bleeding.

When you're rushed to the hospital emergency room with pain in the chest area, tightening in arms or shoulders, shortness of breath, and nausea, these may be symptoms of a heart attack.

It is the duty and responsibility of the hospital ER team to properly diagnose and treat you. Diagnosing a heart attack commonly includes, but is not limited to:

• Immediate screening
• Immediate monitoring
• Electrocardiogram
• Medical history
• Blood tests
• Chest X-ray
• Angiogram
• CT and MRI
• Other tests

Many women are frequently released from the ER without being properly diagnosed or treated although they present with heart attack symptoms. Often, women do not experience chest pain with a heart attack. Based on the lack of chest pain, they are commonly released from the ER. In many instances, doctors simply do not conduct diagnostic tests.

The chance of surviving a heart attack depends on the treatment you receive within the first hour of the heart attack. Therefore, failure to diagnose a heart attack can have devastating consequences and can even result in death.

When ER medical personnel fail to diagnose a heart attack and the result is injury or death, we can help the victim or the legal heirs pursue monetary compensation.