What to do if you've been harmed

  1. Request all medical records from the doctor. This should include all consent forms you've signed. Try to do everything by email if possible for a paper trail. Email again if any records are missed. The doctor is allowed to charge nothing more than a small clerical fee.
  2. Consult a medical malpractice lawyer immediately. The statute of limitations in your state is a hard limit for filing a civil lawsuit to be compensated.
  3. If your case involved a medical device or drug/product, submit an adverse event report with the FDA, which compels the manufacturer to investigate and publicly respond with their analysis within a month, which can exclude device malfunction or indicate if the doctor improperly administered something. Leave your email in that form so that the manufacturer can contact you for additional data—your email will not be made public.
  4. File a complaint with the medical board in the state you were harmed in. Regardless of anything you've signed or any other actions, you always retain the right to file a medical board complaint. Make sure you know the statute of limitations here too, which is separate from the civil suit statute of limitations.
  5. Do not sign anything from the doctor after the incident. If they force you to sign an NDA in exchange for recompensation, carefully consider if that is worth your right to speak out about it. You can try to amend the contract to exlude that provision, as the FTC Consumer Review Fairness Act ensures consumers meaningful opportunity to negotiate nondisclosure terms. Also note that anything you signed before the procedure/incident cannot take away your right to post reviews about it based on the FTC Consumer Review Fairness Act, which says any NDA you sign prior to service is illegal and has the potential to invalidate the entire contract.
Sign our petition to make the National Practitioner Databank public. It's a federal repository of medical malpractice payments and adverse actions related to doctors. It purports to have a mission "to improve health care quality, protect the public, and reduce health care fraud and abuse in the U.S.", but it explicitly excludes the very patients who would benefit most from seeing findings against doctors from gaining access.