About one in five people will develop cancer in their lifetime. These serious conditions can require extensive medical care and often times, can put your life at risk. It’s difficult enough to face a cancer diagnosis, but it can be even tougher if the cancer might have been caught earlier had a medical professional not been negligent.
An early cancer diagnosis can usually make a significant difference in your survival rate. The failure to diagnose cancer promptly may constitute medical malpractice, but can a primary doctor be responsible for your injuries after a cancer misdiagnosis?
Primary Care Doctors and Their Duties of Care
Like other healthcare providers, primary care doctors have a duty of responsibility toward their patients. This means they must provide the standard level of expected care. If they fail to do so, they can be held liable for the injuries they cause.
Primary care doctors are your principal point of contact when facing health concerns. If you’ve begun to experience symptoms like fatigue or weight loss, you may turn to your doctor for a diagnosis. It is their duty to then perform an array of diagnostic exams to get to the bottom of the problem.
A failure to diagnose cancer usually occurs at this step. Your primary care doctor might not consider your symptoms important enough to address fully, might not order appropriate testing, or might fail to refer you to a specialist who is more adept at evaluating your particular symptoms. If another provider would have acted differently than your doctor, it may be possible to initiate a medical malpractice claim for misdiagnosis.
What Can Lead to a Failure to Diagnose Cancer?
Your primary care doctor may end up failing to diagnose cancer as a result of a few common errors.
Not Ordering the Right Diagnostic Tests
If a patient presents with symptoms they can’t account for, it is up to their primary care doctor to conduct a comprehensive exam to determine the issue. Typically, this will involve a physical examination and a battery of blood tests. However, if these don’t offer answers, other options, such as imaging studies (x-rays, CT scans, MRI’s, etc.), can spot masses and other signs of potential cancers.
If your doctor doesn’t perform all of the available diagnostic tests when another professional in the same position would have done so, they may have breached their duty of care to you.
Not Offering a Referral to a Specialist
Primary care doctors usually do not have the specialized knowledge to diagnose all forms of cancer. If they suspect that a patient may have cancer but are not certain of the diagnosis, they must refer that patient to a specialist. The specialist will then perform the necessary tests to obtain a diagnosis. All too often, primary care doctors don’t give enough credence to the patient’s symptoms to provide a referral.
Misinterpreting Tests
It’s also possible for your primary care doctor to misinterpret the results of a diagnostic test that they order. They could misread blood test results and consider the results within the normal range when they are not, or they might misread an imaging study if they read it themselves.
Miscommunicating With Specialists
A primary care doctor may refer you to a specialist, but if they don’t offer your medical history and the results of all of the tests they’ve performed, the specialist may not catch the condition before it gets worse or may not sense the urgency of the referral. In addition, errors can involve results getting lost or the doctor forgetting to update records with the most up-to-date test results or studies.
Beginning a Medical Malpractice Claim After a Doctor Misses a Diagnosis of Cancer
If your primary care doctor failed to diagnose cancer and your condition worsened, you may be able to initiate a medical malpractice claim. These are complex legal processes that require proving that your doctor didn’t provide the standard level of care.
To make everything more complicated, the statute of limitations typically allows a patient one year from the date when the patient first discovered the injury, not to exceed three years from the date of the injury no matter when the discovery was discovered. That may seem like a long time, but it is not.
A medical malpractice claim offers the chance to recover your losses. You can receive coverage for the medical expenses you have incurred, as well as for any future medical care you will need. A settlement can also cover your lost wages, as well as your loss of earning potential if you can’t return to work in the same capacity.
Additionally, you can receive compensation for the emotional and physical suffering you’ve experienced because of the missed diagnosis. If you can’t live your life as you used to, that, too, can be included as part of your losses in a settlement.
Fighting for Compensation After a Cancer Misdiagnosis
If your primary care doctor is responsible for a failure to diagnose cancer in a timely manner and you suffered because of it, filing a medical malpractice claim can provide the assistance you need.
At The Trial Law Offices of Bradley I. Kramer, M.D., Esq., our medical malpractice lawyers are medical professionals, too, and provide invaluable insight into cases involving cancer misdiagnosis, doctors not finding cancer before it’s too late and other related malpractice claims. Please feel free to contact our team anytime to schedule a free consultation.