What Is Failure To Diagnose?

Doctors have a responsibility to their patients to provide a certain standard of care and take all the necessary steps towards accurately diagnosing a patient in a timely manner. 

Failure to diagnose a medical condition is one of the most common types of medical malpractice lawsuits. This failure can potentially have very serious consequences for the patient, and a doctor who is negligent can be putting many lives at risk. A medical malpractice case that involves failure to diagnose can easily lead to wrongful death if the condition is serious enough and progresses past the point where it is treatable. The most common dangerous misdiagnosed or undiagnosed conditions are heart attack, appendicitis, lung cancer, breast cancer, and colon cancer.

See A Doctor Regularly

To reduce the chances of a condition being misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all, you should seek regular medical treatment and not have large time lapses between visits to the doctor, and make sure to follow your doctor’s advice as to treatment. When there are long lapses in time between visits to the doctor, it can mean that there are more unaddressed medical conditions that the doctor will have to sort through before he or she can get to a diagnosis. If you do your part by seeing a doctor regularly, it will help to avoid the escalation of any medical issues and make it easier for you to receive better care, more quickly.

Why Failure to Diagnose is a Serious Problem

Doctors have a responsibility to their patients to provide a certain standard of care and take all the necessary steps towards accurately diagnosing a patient in a timely manner. Proving that medical malpractice has occurred can be difficult because doctors are required to provide reasonable judgment, but that is open to interpretation and should be evaluated on an individual basis.  Doctors have a responsibility to take every step towards accurate diagnosis because patients entrust their lives to physicians and rely on their expertise. Failure to properly diagnose a patient can have very real, very serious consequences. In some cases, like failure to diagnose cancers, heart attack, or stroke, this negligence can lead to the condition worsening until it becomes untreatable. Diabetes and hypertension are also commonly undiagnosed, and can be very serious, but still are less immediately severe than cancers, appendicitis, heart attack, and stroke.

Find a Medical Malpractice Attorney

Because people put so much trust in doctor’s ability to diagnose and treat, when a doctor is too busy to pay attention, misreads an x-ray, fails to order more diagnostic tests, or overlooks or ignores a set of symptoms, this negligence needs to be atoned for.  Patients are put at serious risk when the standard of care is not adhered to. Finding a medical malpractice attorney who can help determine what the best course of action for your case will be, will improve your chances for receiving the compensation that you deserve. And hopefully this will call attention to the facility or doctor that was negligent, and prevent further instances of malpractice in the future.

The time allowed by law in Missouri and Illinois which you may file a medical malpractice lawsuit arising from a failure to diagnose is limited. If you wait to contact an attorney, you may end up being barred by the statute of limitations from proceeding.

photo credit: a.drian