You or a loved one suffered serious side effects that you believe were caused by a defective drug or medical product. Maybe a kidney dialysis medication caused your husband to go into cardiac arrest. Perhaps a broken titration machine overdosed your sister, provoking seizures and a stroke.
In any case, one huge challenge that you will face — if you hope to file and win a lawsuit in North Carolina related to the defective drug or device — is the challenge of parsing cause and effect.
You need to be able to show — through evidence and careful argumentation — that someone else’s negligence, corruption, carelessness, or other malfeasance caused the injuries in question.
To you, the situation may seem obvious.
For instance, let’s say your husband suffered a heart attack while he was getting dialysis treatment. The defense might point to his medical records and suggest that his high levels of blood triglycerides showed that he had an elevated risk for heart disease. The drug didn’t cause the problem, the defense might argue. Your spouse was almost certain to have a heart attack, dialysis treatment or not.
You can imagine the nearly infinite variations on this theme that a savvy defense can develop.
Parsing the truth about medical mysteries is no small task.
Even when your situation seems obvious and compelling, you might be forgetting about certain risk factors that you had prior to the injury — alternative hypotheses that the defense will almost certainly research and bring up during your case. Furthermore, the longer you wait to begin to investigate the causal connection, the more doubt the defense can create in the minds of other people.
It’s one thing if you instantly suffered a stroke after being administered a certain medication. Then it becomes easier to connect cause and effect. But what if you suffered a stroke six months after being exposed to a dodgy medication? And what if you simultaneously had other health problems? The more indirect the relationship — in time and in physiology — the more difficult it will be to build a bulletproof case that the bad drug or product caused the harm.
To that end, the longer that you delay connecting with an experienced North Carolina class action or personal injury law firm — that specializes in your type of case! — the more time will elapse between the incident and the injury, and the more legal challenges you will face on the road to compensation and justice.
For detailed assistance with your case, talk to the DeMayo Law team to set up your free case evaluation.
