A legal medicine expert in Fort Wayne, IN is usually a local physician with expertise in one or more specialties of medicine, and who is called upon to determine the medical impact of an accident or other medical event in order to determine legal liability or the amount of compensation due to a victim.
Legal medical experts might also be called upon to examine patient records in order to determine whether there are grounds for civil or disciplinary malpractice proceedings against a medical practitioner or health care facility.
Patients usually do not contact a legal medicine expert directly. Most are called upon by attorneys or by medical licensing review boards which need to examine medical evidence to determine legal responsibility. While some legal experts are retired or academic physicians who do not see patients, some practicing physicians will perform legal expertise related to their specialty, or serve on medical review boards that deal with incompetent or impaired physicians.
There are legal medical specialists who are also trained attorneys but with the exception of forensic pathologists who deal mostly with criminal cases, legal medical experts do not receive any specific training. They are usually chosen for their experience with particular facets of medical practice, and often include trauma surgeons who are called upon to explain to a jury just how much damage was done to a patient as a result of an accident or even a criminal assault.
The experts help to determine compensation by estimating costs of medical care for continued treatment or rehabilitation of the victim. In addition, they are able to predict the degree of disability that the patient may suffer on a permanent basis due to the damage sustained in the incident that is being dealt with in the courts.
In a malpractice case, a medical expert who is versed in the legal system will be brought into court or otherwise deposed in order to explain how a case should have been treated and where the error occurred. In some cases, the attending physician may have provided the best possible standard of care, only to be sued because of what an expert explains was actually a hospital error. In such cases, the expert is often the one whose testimony ensures that a victim will receive adequate and fair compensation from all parties responsible for malpractice.
Rarely does a legal medicine expert in Fort Wayne, IN directly serve a patient, but his knowledge of local medical costs, practices and facilities does much to help patients who seek redress through the legal system.
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