What Is Failure To Diagnose?

Sometimes clients will call me asking about a kind of case that are called failure to diagnose cases.

A failure to diagnose case is where the physician fails to diagnose a disease or a condition as a result of not doing so, as it progresses and cause the patient harm.

Examples of that would be cancer. Every kind of cancer unfortunately has a failure to diagnose kind of case associated with it. Examples would be prostate cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer; each of these cancers has a different procedure that physicians need to go through the signs and symptoms which might be ignored.  The physician in the particular case that were talking about did not respond to either the signs and symptoms, did not review an imaging study, did not do what should have been done and unfortunately in a cancer case that means that the cancer grew and spread.

Of course there are other cases besides cancer cases. Failure to diagnose an infection is a similar kind of idea, though the infection isn’t diagnosed and the infection spreads and people can die from that.  There can be bleeding after surgery that isn’t diagnosed and as a result the patient bleeds out, or even dies.

If you have a case that you think involved failure to diagnose, and you’d like us to look into it for you, please give us a call.

This blog post was provided by Marc Chase, an experienced Brooklyn medical malpractice attorney.

Also, check out our medical malpractice education series to learn more.