Troy Delayed Cancer Diagnosis Lawyer

When you make an appointment at your physician’s office for a routine or annual exam, or when you seek a medical assessment based on specific symptoms you are experiencing, you should be able to trust that your healthcare provider will make an accurate cancer diagnosis. At Powers & Santola, LLP, we know how terrifying it can be to receive a cancer diagnosis, but we also know how essential it is to catch cancers in early stages so that you can make a full recovery. When a doctor fails to properly identify cancer in an early stage and a patient goes months or even years before receiving an accurate diagnosis, that patient ultimately may learn that she or he has a terminal disease that cannot be cured.

When patients suffer from delayed cancer diagnosis, it is critical to seek advice from a Troy delayed cancer diagnosis lawyer about filing a claim. A delayed cancer diagnosis is often the result of medical negligence and you may be able to hold your healthcare provider accountable by filing a medical malpractice lawsuit.

Diagnostic errors are common types of medical mistakes that lead to medical malpractice claims in upstate New York. There are multiple kinds of diagnostic errors that can result in a delayed cancer diagnosis, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

For example, if a healthcare provider misdiagnoses a patient’s symptoms and diagnoses the patient as having something other than cancer, that patient might not seek the opinion of another healthcare provider until cancer has spread. Or, for instance, if a patient visits a doctor for an annual screening exam and the doctor fails to identify signs of cancer, the patient might not return to a healthcare provider until she is experiencing symptoms. At that point, cancer may have spread.

Diagnostic errors are a form of medical malpractice. In general, if you want to file a medical malpractice claim after a delayed cancer diagnosis, you will need to prove the elements necessary to win a medical malpractice lawsuit. Generally speaking, a patient who suffered a delayed cancer diagnosis will need to show the following:

• Duty of care;
• Breach of the duty of care (i.e., doctor was negligent);
• Breach caused the patient’s injury; and
• Patient suffered damages.

In cases arising from the delayed diagnosis, that is usually done by showing that if the patient’s cancer had been timely diagnosed at an earlier stage the 5-year survival rate of the patient would have been better. For example, the average 5-year survival rate for women with non-metastatic invasive breast cancer is 91%. The average 10-year survival rate for women with invasive breast cancer is 84%. If cancer has spread to a distant part of the body, the 5-year survival rate is 27%.