Our blog

February 2024

I recently received a call from an acquaintance about his cousin that was diagnosed with cancer.  He went to the doctor complaining of feeling ill and having swelling in his neck area, but the doctors he was seeing told him it was an infection or that he was just getting over the flu.  He did not think anything of it until a few months later, when the lump started to grow noticeably larger.   

Again, his doctors did not think it was a concern and sent him for an x-ray and told him to take antibiotics.  When the lump still did not go away, he sought a specialist, who referred him for an ultrasound, and he was ultimately diagnosed with cancer.  He needed a surgery and several rounds of chemotherapy, but he is now doing much better and expects a full recovery.

A cancer diagnosis on its own can be a shocking and terrifying experience.  Your doctor will explain in medical terms what type of cancer was found, where the cancer is, what the treatment options are and what the prognosis will be.  At this point, most people are in a daze and are not really retaining the information as they are still reeling from the initial shock of receiving this news.

However, sometimes the cancer that was ultimately found was misdiagnosed earlier by your doctors.  On top of the shock and stress of dealing with the cancer, now you have to recognize and confront the fact that maybe you would not have been as sick, or needed as much treatment, or avoided treatment at all if the cancer was detected at an earlier stage. 

In order to sue a doctor or hospital for a missed diagnosis of cancer, an attorney must be able to prove that the cancer was present and should have been detected, or at the very least, that the appropriate tests or referrals to specialists should have been made.  In addition, the attorney must be able to show that the delay in diagnosing the cancer was not reasonable, and that it contributed to a worsening of the cancer to a more advanced stage, requiring more extensive treatment, a worse prognosis and a decreased chance of a cure.

All of this must be shown through the medical records and the attorney must retain an expert, a doctor that is trained and experienced in the field, to testify and explain how the records show that the cancer should have been found earlier and that since it was not, the patient is now in a worse position with a more advanced cancer, requiring more extensive and damaging treatment, with a significant loss of a chance of a cure.

The specifics of each case are different, so that there is not one "roadmap" to proving medical malpractice based upon a delayed diagnosis of cancer.  Generally though, we must be able to show that the cancer was present at a visit with the doctor or hospital, and that the doctor or hospital did not detect it or did not order the appropriate tests or have the appropriate specialist examine the patient. 

This can be done by having a pathologist examine the patient's tumor, if one is present, or to review any relevant radiological imaging or other medical test results.  The type of tumor cells will give the pathologist an idea of how fast that tumor can grow from those cells.