New Jersey Medical Malpractice Lawyers Representing Clients in Failure to Diagnose Heart Attack Cases

Each year 735,000 Americans have a heart attack, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s one heart attack every 43 seconds. Heart disease is the leading cause of death for both men and women in the U.S., where a quarter of all deaths are due to heart disease.

When Doctors Fail to Diagnose America’s Leading Cause of Death

Medical professionals are familiar with these sobering statistics. Doctors and nurses are trained to recognize the signs of heart attack (acute myocardial infarction) and take quick action to save their patients. Despite well-established standards of care, however, people in New Jersey continue to suffer heart attacks that could have — and should have — been diagnosed earlier.

Timely diagnosis and treatment of a heart attack are critical to the patient’s outcome. A medical professional’s failure to diagnose a heart attack is often a fatal error. When patients manage to survive a heart attack despite a failure to diagnose, their hearts may be so severely damaged they are left with permanent, life-altering symptoms.

Experienced New Jersey Medical Malpractice Attorneys

Did you or a member of your family suffer harm because a doctor failed to diagnose a heart attack? You may be able to pursue financial compensation for the damages. The medical malpractice attorneys of Team Law represent individuals who have suffered heart damage aggravated by the negligence of doctors, nurses or other medical professionals. We represent patients who survive as well as family members of those who died because of the failure to diagnose and treat the heart attack.
Led by attorney Roy J. Konray, our legal team is skilled at reviewing medical records and other evidence to determine whether a doctor or emergency room violated the accepted standard of care for diagnosing a heart attack. We have a history of achieving significant verdicts and settlements in complex medical malpractice cases, including those involving failure to diagnose heart attacks.

Did Your Doctor Take These Essential Steps?

Whenever a patient reports pain above the waist, numbness in the chin, jaw or hands, or any other symptom of heart attack, doctors typically take a chest X-ray to check for an enlarged heart; perform an EKG to assess the electrical activity of the heart; and check for cardiac enzymes in the blood that are produced when heart cells die.

If the doctor fails to take these steps and the patient later suffers a heart attack, the doctor may be held accountable for his carelessness in court. In some instances, the doctor may have ordered the proper tests, but failed to interpret the results properly. This, too, is negligence.

A Far Too Common Scenario

A medical professional’s failure to diagnose a heart attack can happen in a clinic setting or hospital. A frequent scenario involves a patient who comes to an emergency room complaining of a stabbing pain in the upper body . The patient may attribute the pain to indigestion . While this explanation may seem logical, the doctor may have a duty to order tests for a heart attack.

Did you or a member of your family suffer a heart attack that a medical professional failed to diagnose? You may be entitled to receive financial compensation for your losses. To arrange a free consultation and case evaluation, please contact the medical malpractice attorneys at Team Law online or call 1-800-TEAM-LAW.

Team Law serves medical malpractice clients throughout Essex, Hudson, Union and Middlesex counties and throughout NJ from many convenient office locations including Clark, Elizabeth, West New York, Newark, Orange, Jersey City, Perth Amboy, New Brunswick, and Summit.