Almost half of the medical malpractice lawsuits filed every year have to do with a failure to diagnose. These aren’t lawsuits over someone leaving a surgical instrument in the body after closing the wound, about giving someone the wrong medication or about not treating someone at all. These lawsuits are about a doctor’s competence as it relates to being able to give diagnoses that save lives.
Diagnoses and Medicine
A great deal of the time that doctors spend in med school is spent learning how to diagnose conditions successfully. A great deal of how they protect their patient’s lives depends upon the physician’s ability to see what’s actually wrong.
There are cases where doctors do fail in this regard. People have been sent home from the ER with conditions as dangerous as fractured necks and have ended up suing for millions after the fact. The only reason that they weren’t diagnosed and treated properly was because of medical negligence and, because of that, these people sometimes decide that suing is the best option for them to recover their damages.
What if it Was a Logical Mistake?
There are cases where doctors cannot be expected to find a condition right away. In fact, sometimes doctors have to test and analyze a patient over and over to figure out what’s actually ailing them. Sometimes, there’s really no way that a doctor could have failed to find a condition, but there are some cases when they should have and, when someone is hurt because of that failure, medical malpractice lawsuits may be options.
The doctor will have to have taken you on as a patient, to begin with. You cannot, for example, sue a doctor for not recognizing that the cough they heard you struggling with in the ER was due to lung cancer. If they had every opportunity to give you a chest x-ray, to run other tests and to diagnose your cancer and if they failed in that duty, causing you to get sicker, you may be able to sue.
Why Sue Over This?
The reason people sue over failures to diagnose is the same as the reason that they sue over anything else. The failure to diagnose injures them physically and financially and it should have never happened. This means that the doctor was negligent and that means that the patient may have an option to file a lawsuit in front of them.
Finding An Experienced Personal Injury Attorney
Talking to a Personal Injury Attorney can help you clear your case up. It may not be that the physician was ultimately responsible for the failure, but the personal injury attorney should be able to tell you whether or not this is the case. There may be more investigation required but, if you consult with an injury attorney, they can usually tell pretty quickly whether or not they could help you. If they can help you, they may end up putting together a lawsuit and helping you to get compensated for the pain and suffering and financial losses that you’ve been put through.