Maryland is one of the few states in the United States that still follows a very strict law as to a person contributing to their own medical injury.
This legal concept is called contributory negligence.
What this means is that if a person is even 1% responsible for their injury, then under Maryland law they cannot recover for their injures.
In other words, you can’t contribute to your own injury.
For a better understanding of how this can work here is a simple example.
A person has chest pains and goes to his doctor for help.
The doctor says that the patient needs to have a chest X-Ray and explains this to the client.
With that said, the patient does not follow up with the doctor or get the needed X-Ray completed.
We go into time 2 years and the patient is again complaining to the doctor about chest pains and other complaints.
However, this time the patient does get the X-Ray done and it is discovered that the patient has a massive tumor on his lung.
The patient then explains to the doctor, “how did you miss this?”
In the above example, if the patient tries to file a medical malpractice law suit there is a good chance that the doctor is going to defend on the grounds that the patient “contributed” to his own injury because when the patient refused to get the initial X-Ray done.
If you have more questions about whether you may have a cancer misdiagnosis case or whether you have been the victim of medical malpractice this is what we invite you to do if your matter happened in Maryland.
Pick up the phone and give us a call.
It costs you nothing to call us.
We can be reached at 301-850-4832.
We answer Maryland medical malpractice cases like yours all the time an we would be glad to listen to your story.
