Billings Personal Injury Law Blog

When you visit your Montana doctor and that physician diagnoses you with a serious medical condition, it may serve you well to seek a second opinion before panicking. At Edmiston & Colton Law Firm, we have seen firsthand the hardships and complications that can arise when patients receive inaccurate or incomplete medical diagnoses, and we have helped many people whose conditions worsened due to medical misdiagnosis pursue legal solutions that meet their needs.

According to AARP, about one in every five patients who meet with their primary care physicians find out that they received inaccurate medical diagnoses during their initial visits with their primary care doctors. In one study conducted by the Mayo Clinic, more than 20% of Americans who sought diagnoses from their primary care doctors received diagnoses that were wholly inaccurate, while another 66% received diagnoses that were at least partially incorrect.

Bike accidents in Montana sometimes result in major medical bills and other types of losses: all things that you would probably not want to pay for if you had a choice. A lawsuit might help you recover some of the damages you suffered, but that is not truly the purpose of the legal system.

The court is typically not interested in forcing people to pay for other people's injuries. Rather, you would seek justice through a personal injury lawsuit. You would typically ask for enough resources to make yourself whole again after somebody injured you. That is why, even if you believed an accident was partially your fault, you may still want to pursue your case.

In this day and age of advanced technology, drivers are able to speak to their vehicles. You are no longer required to manually switch the radio station, make a phone call or compose a text. Instead, in-vehicle technologies work by understanding verbal commands and can carry out a myriad of tasks with just the sound of your voice. This technology, however, is not foolproof, and defects in voice-activated technology features may cause a significant amount of cognitive distraction. 

In one study, a team of researchers set out to measure the mental workload created by using voice-activated devices and how they can interfere with the task of driving itself. The study looked at six different technologies and how they affected a person’s ability to drive. Participants were asked to complete a driving course while engaging in several voice-activated tasks, including changing the music and dialing phone numbers. Researchers then look at participants’ reaction time, heart rate and brain activity, as well as the drivers’ subjective responses regarding how they felt during the activity. 

If you are like many other Americans, you may enjoy going out for dinner and drinks or spending an evening out on the town. When doing so, many people choose to designate a driver as a person who will refrain from drinking alcohol and ensure everyone gets home safely. Yet, while many people trust the designated driver to stay sober and be a safe form of transportation, some DDs do not meet up to these standards.

A study released in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs reported that at least 40% of designated drivers have had alcohol at some point in the evening before climbing behind the wheel. In some cases, the designated drivers had consumed enough alcohol to cause an impaired ability to drive. Approximately 18% of designated drivers tested in the study had a blood alcohol content level of 0.05% or higher. Although the legal limit is 0.08% in most states, drivers show impairments in as little as 0.02%.