Can I sue a hospital if they perscribed me a medication that gave me a lifetime disease?
Question Details:
I have bipolar, and I was hospitalized for almost a month. I was having side effects to my medication so they perscribed me 50 mg. of Moban. After I was discharged, I started to have more side effects. I was having facial ticks. When I went to my regular psychiatrist she said that Moban was discontinued in the early 1990's because it caused a lifetime disease called tardive dyskinesia and that was what I was developing. I stoped taking Moban and the ticks went away but, I still blink more than normal.
I think you should talk to a medical malpractice attorney about this. If you were given a medication that was no longer FDA-approved, I'd think you would have a very strong case. I'm not sure whether your case is worth very much in damages, if you didn't end up with tardive dyskinesia; fair compensation for blinking more than normal, and the temporary experience of facial tics, might not amount to much. However, a good lawyer might be able to make a case for punitive damages, on these facts.
The attorney will probably want to have your records reviewed, before deciding whether or not to take your case. This is standard practice, in this kind of lawsuit, because success may well depend on whether a doctor testifying as your expert witness will be more convincing than the doctor testifying as the hospital's expert.
