Meyers Rule of Medical Malpractice

Medical malpractice is a dereliction of professional duty or a failure to exercise an accepted degree of professional skill or learning by a physician or other health care provider rendering professional medical services which results in injury or death.

Meyer’s First Rule of Medical Malpractice

If a person has suffered brain damage in the hospital, which their families are informed was due to a lack of oxygen, and that injury occurred when the patient was on a monitored unit, those injuries are almost always avoidable. The window of time in which you can suffer diminished oxygen content sufficient to cause brain injury, which doesn’t kill you, is fairly narrow. The fact that the patient hasn’t died suggests that the health care providers had at their disposal the means of correcting the lack of adequate blood pressure or lack of oxygen with the medication and equipment at hand but failed to do so in time. And since all needed personnel, medication and equipment is to be readily on hand in such units, there is no excuse for a person having suffered a brain injury due to a lack of oxygen in a witnessed setting.

Meyers Second Rule of Medical Malpractice

Not all risks of a procedure of which a patient has been informed prior to the procedure’s occurrence are risks which are unavoidable.

For example, often prior to gall bladder surgery a patient is informed they might suffer damage to their bile ducts as a complication.. And so following a laparoscopic cholecystectomy a patient who has been so informed ends up having a leak of bile and is sent to a tertiary care center. They require surgery, typically a procedure to reconstruct their bowel and redeposit their bile duct coming from their liver in a safer location. Such patients are led to believe that such a thing was one of those “unavoidable risks”, but the fact of the matter is that unintended injury to bile ducts during a laparoscopic cholecystectomy is invariably due to carelessness in identification of bile ducts. No duct is to be divided without having been identified with certainty prior to being cut.