Failed Cancer Diagnosis Can Be a Fatal Mistake by Lynn Fugaro

One of the most frequent types of medical malpractice cases is the failure to diagnose cancer. Cancer is a group of more than 100 different diseases and occurs when cells become abnormal and keep dividing and forming more cells at an alarming speed. If cells continue to divide when new cells are not needed, a mass of excess tissue is formed; this excess of cells forms a tumor. Tumors can be either benign (non-cancerous) or malignant (cancerous). Cancer cells can also invade nearby tissues or travel through the bloodstream to form additional tumors elsewhere.

Some cancers have warning signs such as unusual bleeding or discharge, change in bowel/bladder habits, a thickening or lump in a body part, digestion problems/difficulty swallowing, or a nagging cough/hoarseness. A biopsy is one of the only sure methods to find out if cancer is present. During a biopsy, a physician removes a part of the tissue and examines it under a microscope to see if there are cancer cells present. Cancer can be treated with surgery, hormone therapy, radiation therapy, or chemotherapy.

There are some screening tests utilized for early detection of some cancers. Yearly pap smears and mammograms are tools doctors use to detect cervical cancer and breast cancer. Colonoscopy and flexible sigmoidoscopy are used to detect colon and rectal cancer.

Cancers can be missed when these early detection tests are not properly administered or when they are simply not ordered at all. Some of the tests, especially mammograms, can be misread and misinterpreted by a radiologist, leading to the spread of the cancer. Biopsies can also be misread or biopsies that do not properly sample the affected tissue can lead to a failed diagnosis.

As the ability to diagnose cancer continues to improve, a doctor's failure to diagnose cancer becomes more difficult to understand and accept. A patient's chance of survival is directly linked to how early his cancer is diagnosed; failure to diagnose cancer in an early stage may require the patient to undergo more aggressive and painful cancer treatment than would otherwise be necessary. Certainly, a patient's prognosis worsens when cancer is not diagnosed in the early stages.

The following is a list of the most common types of cancer that doctors fail to diagnose:

· Cervical cancer
· Colon cancer
· Breast cancer
· Prostate cancer
· Esophageal cancer

Early treatments of all of these types of cancer are far less painful than the later courses of action necessary as a result of failing to diagnose them early. Often times, chemotherapy and radiation can be avoided if cancer is detected early enough. When a doctor fails to diagnose a cancer, the pain and suffering and financial hardship of the patient increases; this now becomes the physician's responsibility as he/she was the one who missed the early diagnosis.