You may allow yourself to be very vulnerable with your doctor, in the hope that all this shared information will enable them to provide the utmost healthcare. However, if you suspect your doctor has a poor bedside manner, your guard may go back up, so to speak, and you may no longer trust them wholeheartedly. On top of feeling uncomfortable in their presence, your overall medical treatment plan may subsequently be impacted. With that being said, please read on to discover how a doctor’s poor bedside manner can lead to their medical negligence and how a seasoned New York City hospital negligence attorney at Mark L. Bodner, P.C., can help if you were personally affected by this behavior.
How can poor bedside manner lead to medical negligence?
You may believe your treating doctor to have a poor bedside manner if they exhibit a lack of empathy towards your experienced health symptoms and a rude, condescending, or dismissive behavior when you turn to them for help in resolving them. Importantly, there is more depth to this than simply not being pleased with their perceived personality. That is, this behavior may almost always cause a doctor to be negligent in their medical practice.
For one, if a doctor has a disparaging attitude, they may rush through an appointment without taking their patient’s fears or anxieties seriously. Without truly hearing their concerns, they may not think to order certain diagnostic testing, refer them to a specialist, or send them to emergency medical services. In turn, they may fail to diagnose them correctly on time or at all. For example, a doctor may write off a patient’s headache as a common migraine, while in reality, they are experiencing a stroke.
Secondly, when a doctor is not fully invested in a patient’s case, they are more likely to make critical mistakes that make their health condition far worse. For instance, an anesthesiologist may skim through a patient’s chart, or not read it at all, and administer the wrong type or dose of anesthesia given their medical history. Or, a surgeon may not adequately prepare for their scheduled surgery and ultimately operate on the wrong body part or sloppily make punctures or lacerations to surrounding organs.
What damages might result from poor bedside manners?
After your experience with a doctor with poor bedside manners, you may lose your trust in the healthcare system. Specifically, you may feel too discouraged or intimidated to schedule follow-up appointments with your doctor or another doctor, even if your health symptoms persist. Eventually, in a worst-case scenario, your undiagnosed medical condition may become incurable. At the very least, you may suffer from emotional distress when it comes to receiving healthcare for all future events.
This is to say that you may have valid grounds to pursue a medical malpractice claim against your negligent doctor if their poor bedside manners caused your physical pain and emotional suffering. This is not to mention that you may have incurred extra medical bills after having to seek additional medical advice or more intense treatment due to your delayed or misdiagnosis. You may have, in turn, endured lost wages during this physically, mentally, and emotionally draining time in your life.
If you desire more clarity before you head into potential medical malpractice proceedings, please do not wait any longer to reach out to a competent New York City medical malpractice attorney. Retain the services of Mark L. Bodner, P.C., today.