Published by Arfaa Law Group
Elective weight loss surgeries, such as gastric bypass surgery, have been commonplace in Maryland and across the United States. If you or someone close to you suffered a serious injury or even death as a result of gastric bypass surgery, you should speak to a skilled Baltimore medical malpractice attorney who can evaluate the facts of your case. We can scrutinize what happened to determine if malpractice took place.
Gastric bypass surgery is a surgical procedure that helps you lose weight by changing how your stomach and intestine handle the food that you eat. The procedure typically involves creating a small stomach and removing the rest of the stomach. The small intestine is then attached to the new stomach, allowing the lower part of the stomach to be bypassed. The surgery is intended to make your stomach smaller, so you end up absorbing fewer minerals and feeling full sooner. This helps patients eat less, lose weight, and experience an improvement in their overall health.
Just because you didn’t get the results you wanted from gastric bypass surgery does not mean that malpractice took place. There may be a number of reasons the surgery proves to be unsuccessful or not as effective as a patient would have liked.
Having said that, there are certain outcomes that may signal malpractice. For example, malpractice may have taken place if you end up with an infection, a pulmonary embolism, a post-surgical leak, excessive pain, kidney stones, blood clotting, or any other outcome that is not expected after such an operation. In short, malpractice could have occurred during the actual surgery or during post-operative care.
In Maryland, medical malpractice takes place when a health care provider causes an injury or death by acting negligently. In order to prevail on a medical malpractice claim, the patient must establish the following: the health care provider owed the patient a duty of care; the health care provider breached the duty of care owed to the plaintiff; the health care provider’s breach was a direct cause of the patient’s harm; and the patient incurred damages. A duty of care refers to the legal obligation of a health care provider to adhere to the standard of care that a prudent health care provider in the same specialty would have used in the same or similar circumstances. Put simply, a surgeon performing a gastric bypass surgery must use the same level of care that another surgeon performing the same procedure would have used.
Medical malpractice claims must be filed within a certain time limit, known as the statute of limitations. Thus, if you are even contemplating such a claim, you should reach out to an attorney sooner rather than later.
If you sustained a serious injury or someone you know died as a result of gastric bypass surgery, you need to reach out to a Baltimore surgical malpractice attorney who can determine whether or not you may have a malpractice claim. At Arfaa Law Group, we are committed to holding negligent medical professionals accountable for the harm that they cause. You should be aware that we take on clients from all across Maryland. To learn more, feel free to call 410-889-1850 or contact us online.
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