Each year, Americans file about 8,500 dental malpractice lawsuits against careless and negligent dentists, and one of the most common causes of these medical malpractice suits are wrong tooth extractions.
“In the vast majority of cases, wrong-site tooth extraction and removal of the wrong tooth is completely preventable,” says our Philadelphia wrong tooth extraction attorney at The Weitz Firm, LLC. If your dentist pulled the wrong tooth, you may be entitled to seek financial compensation for this avoidable type of dental malpractice.
All medical professionals owe a duty of care to their patients, and dentists are no exception. If a dentist removes your healthy tooth instead of the damaged one, he or she may have committed medical malpractice. By doing so, your dentist is breaching the standard of care if your experienced wrong tooth extraction attorney in Philadelphia or elsewhere in Pennsylvania can prove that another dentist of reasonable competence would not have made the same mistake under the same set of circumstances.
However, you may be able to sue your dentist for pulling healthy teeth only if you can prove the following elements of a dental malpractice lawsuit:
Your dentist may remove a perfectly healthy tooth for various reasons. Our Philadelphia wrong tooth extraction lawyer explains that in many cases, dentists negligently miscount the damaged or decayed tooth on the x-ray and then miscount the tooth that must be removed in the mouth.
A dentist can also carelessly extract the wrong tooth due to poor visibility or small space between the teeth, or for example, because his or her inexperienced assistant sets up on the wrong tooth for removal.
More often than not, patients do not require another medical expert to testify and establish the standard of care when suing a dentist for wrong tooth extraction in a medical malpractice lawsuit. If you, your child, or another family member’s healthy tooth was removed by a negligent or careless dentist, you most certainly deserve financial compensation.
Get a free consultation by discussing your dentist malpractice case with our wrong tooth extraction lawyer in Philadelphia at The Weitz Firm, LLC. Call our offices at 267-587-6240 today.