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Prescription medication can be a godsend for some and a painful medical complication for others. Your dosage might be too high, or your doctor might have provided incorrect instructions for taking the medicine. Sometimes, patients overdose on prescription medication. While many survive, others do not.
When prescribing medicine, doctors must reasonably act to keep the patient safe and healthy. This might involve careful considerations of dosage, medical histories, and interactions with other drugs. If someone you loved overdosed and died because a doctor was negligent, the doctor might be liable for their death and your family’s damages.
Speak with our lawyers for wrongful deaths from prescription overdoses in a free case assessment by calling The Queenan Law Firm at (817) 476-1797.
Who is Responsible for Wrongful Deaths from Prescription Overdoses in Fort Worth?
Ideally, a doctor should ask patients directly about their medical history before prescribing anything. They should also check available medical records to check for past substance abuse. If a doctor acts without checking a patient’s history or advising them of the risks of abuse, they might be responsible for an overdose death. Medical malpractice claims to hold doctors responsible require extensive investigation by our lawyers for wrongful deaths from prescription overdoses.
In other cases, the manufacturer of the medication might be responsible for wrongful deaths from overdoses. Manufacturers must carefully design and test medication before making it available to the public. If a pharmaceutical company produces an unreasonably dangerous medicine, they might be responsible if someone dies from a likely overdose, especially if they are not transparent about the drug’s high potential for dependency and abuse.
While pharmacists are not doctors and do not provide medical advice, they might still bear some responsibility for overdoses. If the pharmacy fills the wrong prescription wrong dosage, someone might accidentally overdose. Another possibility is that the pharmacy is out of a patient’s medication and offers an alternative without consulting the patient’s doctor.
How an Overdose from Prescriptions Constitutes Wrongful Death
Overdoses from prescription medicine can happen for a variety of reasons. The circumstances of your loved one’s passing dictate who should be held legally responsible and may indicate a wrongful death even if they voluntarily took the medication.
Improper Dosage or Instructions
A common cause of accidental overdoses on prescription medicine is improper dosages or bad instructions from the doctor. If the dosage is too high, the medication might cause serious harm or death. Doctors must be very careful about dosages, taking into account a patient’s height, weight, and medical history. If they do not, they risk prescribing a lethal dosage to an unsuspecting patient.
The doctor is also responsible for providing instructions on how to take the medication. This may include details about how often the patient should take the medicine. Bad instructions can similarly lead patients to take too much.
Failure to Advise
No medication is completely risk-free. While medication can be a huge help, there might be risks that the patient must be made aware of before they start taking the medicine. If your loved one’s doctor failed to advise them of risks related to overdoses, we might be able to hold the doctor liable for your loved one’s wrongful death.
Certain medications can be powerful and addictive. These medications are often only administered in extreme cases where the benefits are worth the risks. Even so, the patient must be told the risks. For example, a doctor might be liable if your loved one was prescribed a powerful and addictive narcotic without being informed of the risk of addiction, abuse, and overdose.
Dangerously Powerful Medicine
While modern medicine has produced potent medications to help patients, some people question whether certain medications are objectively too powerful. For example, medications like OxyContin and Oxycodone were once praised as powerful painkillers. However, it quickly became clear that they were also extremely addicting, commonly causing dependency.
The frequent overdoses from these medications lead many to claim that pharmaceutical companies should be held responsible for producing dangerous drugs and marketing them as safe or otherwise minimizing the risks.
When to File a Wrongful Death Claim Related to a Prescription Overdose in Fort Worth
If you want to sue a doctor for negligently prescribing medication that led to your loved one’s overdose, you may file a medical malpractice case. According to Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 74.251(a), medical malpractice claims must be filed within 2 years after your loved one’s passing. Remember, the limitation period begins on the date of death, not necessarily the day your loved one took the medication. Also, subsection (b) of this law bars claims after 10 years, even if there was some excuse to extend the filing deadline.
If someone other than a medical professional or healthcare institution is responsible for your loved one’s prescription overdose death, § 16.003(b) gives you 2 years from the date of death to file your case.
Gathering Evidence for Wrongful Death Cases from Prescription Overdoses
We should obtain official ingredient lists from the pharmaceutical company. We might discover that the medication is far more powerful than the company leads the public to believe. We may also have the medication reviewed by medical or psychiatric experts to determine if the drug has a serious risk of dependency that the pharmaceutical company is downplaying.
We also need your medical records. People with a history of substance dependency usually have that information in their medical records. If your loved one’s doctor did not ask about this history or did not check their charts for it, they may be held responsible for an overdose.
We need the prescription itself. Even if the doctor prescribed the correct medication, they might have mistakenly prescribed a dangerously high dosage. If the prescription indicates an appropriate dosage, it’s possible that the pharmacy filled the wrong dosage.
Speak to Our Fort Worth Lawyers for Wrongful Deaths from Prescription Overdoses for Legal Help
Speak with our attorneys for wrongful deaths from prescription overdoses in a free case review by calling The Queenan Law Firm at (817) 476-1797.