Cerebral Palsy | Causes

What Causes Cerebral Palsy?

Cerebral palsy is caused by a specific type of brain injury. This brain injury results when the brain is starved of oxygen for long enough to affect that part of the brain that controls the muscles. There is sometimes other damage done to the brain, as well, that compounds the issue and causes other effects. Cerebral palsy is quite often the effect of a birth injury and baby brain damage can have devastating consequences.

Baby Brain Damage

Pregnancy and giving birth are very complex processes. There are occasions during both when a child may be damaged by naturally occurring conditions that cannot be prevented. There are, however, sometimes occasions when medical intervention could prevent a child from being injured.

An example of this is when there is too low a level of amniotic fluid in the womb to sustain the child. In these cases, a competent doctor will oftentimes order a cesarean section to remove the child before any damage results. There have been cases where physicians have been sued for not taking this action quickly enough to prevent the child from being injured. In those cases, cerebral palsy was sometimes the ultimate result of the injury that resulted from the in action.

What needs to have happened for a parent to successfully sue a healthcare provider for their child coming down with cerebral palsy is some incident that involved medical negligence. Medical negligence is not the same thing as medical incompetence. Negligence means not delivering the quality of care that could be expected of any competent physician under the same circumstances. Doctors are held to very high standards for a reason and, when they fail to live up to those standards, filing a lawsuit in civil court is one of the recourses that parents have available to them to seek compensation.

These lawsuits are not filed for frivolous reasons. The costs of paying for treatment for individuals with cerebral palsy are oftentimes extremely high. Add to this the fact that the child will, at some point, be without their parents to take care of them and you can see why some parents want to get as much money as they can to make sure that their child is provided for after they are gone. These cases sometimes payout substantial amounts, but it is up to the jury to determine whether or not the plaintiff deserves the money they're seeking and how much.