Failure to Diagnose Serious Medical Conditions

A medical misdiagnosis lawyer investigates what went wrong.  Emergency room doctors, family doctors and specialists see patients with new symptoms and concerns. In cases where symptoms are consistent with potentially deadly conditions or conditions that require urgent treatment an incorrect diagnosis may have irreparable consequences. If a doctor fails to diagnose a serious medical condition and you suffered an injury that could have been prevented by a timely diagnosis you may have a medical misdiagnosis malpractice claim.

A medical misdiagnosis suit for a failure to timely diagnose a medical condition typically requires the following elements:

• A patient that presents to a doctor with symptoms that should have triggered an investigation to determine whether the patient suffers from a potentially serious medical condition.
• The patient fails to receive medical care that would have been triggered by a correct diagnosis.
• The patient suffers a serious injury or death that timely treatment more likely than not would have prevented.

The medical misdiagnosis lawyer at Patterson Law offers free consultations to review potential medical misdiagnosis claims.

Doctors are trained to avoid making potentially life-threatening errors. Jumping to a conclusion leads to errors and in the field of medicine jumping to a conclusion can be deadly. For example, a 35-year-old athletic man arrives at an urgent care facility with complaints of pain near his chest after eating a big meal. The doctor diagnoses the young man with indigestion or heart burn. He is discharged and dies of a heart attack.

The doctor failed to order tests to determine whether the young man was having a heart attack because the man appeared to be too young and too healthy to have severe heart disease. The same doctor probably would have ordered the necessary tests for a 50-year-old, over-weight male smoker that would be at a higher risk for heart attacks. Due to the serious consequences of failing to timely diagnose a heart attack the standard of care is to rule out a heart attack as being the cause of symptoms consistent with a heart attack for all patients.

A medical malpractice case requires evidence of harm. The failure to diagnose a condition that is untreatable is a medical error that did not injure the patient. In other cases, the patient seeks care from other doctors that diagnose the condition and provides the necessary treatment in time to prevent any provable harm. A medical malpractice case for failing to timely diagnose a medical condition requires a legal and medical analysis.