Patient May Have A Claim For Medical Malpractice If Physician Fails To Correctly Detect Colon Cancer
By: J. Hernandez
Submitted: 2010-07-04 15:46:33 | Word Count: 573
Consider the situation in which a person who has complained of rectal bleeding to their physician and was assured by the physician that it was most likely caused by hemorrhoids and there was nothing to be concerned about is eventually diagnosed colon cancer. The person now has advanced colon cancer that has reached the lymph nodes or even to a distant organ, such as the liver or the lungs. What legal choices does the patient have in these circumstances?
The first thing to note is that most physicians agree that anytime a person complains of rectal bleeding or blood in the stool a colonoscopy needs to be performed in order to establish the reason for the blood. The colonoscopy helps figure out if the blood is due to colon cancer or something else like hemorrhoids. But merely assuming that the blood is due to hemorrhoids risks missing a cancer.
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Colon cancer is a disease that progresses over time. As it advances it gets harder to treat successfully. For example, when the disease is in stage 1 or stage 2, it is still contained inside the wall of the colon. Treatment for these stages normally involves surgery to take out the tumor and surrounding areas of the colon. Chemotherapy is usually not part of the treatment of stage 1 and stage 2 unless it might be given to an individual who is young as a preventative measure. With surgery, the individual with stage 1 or stage 2 has a good likelihood of outliving the disease for at least 5 years after diagnosis. The relative 5-year survival rate is over 90% for stage 1 and 73% for stage 2.
By the time the cancer progresses to stage 3, it has spread outside the colon. At this stage treatment calls for both surgery and chemotherapy (possibly with additional medications as well). The relative 5-year survival rate for stage 3 is fifty three percent. If it progress to stage 4, the relative 5-year survival rate is reduced to around eight percent. Treatments such as surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and other medications may or may not still be effective. Once treatment stops being effective, the disease becomes fatal. Approximately forty eight thousand people will die from colon cancer this year alone.
If the individual with rectal bleeding gets a colonoscopy and the tumor is discovered prior to spreading to the lymph nodes or to other organs, it can often be removed in the course of the colonoscopy if it is sufficiently small or by surgically removing the section of the colon containing the tumor. Thus the additional time before diagnosis and treatmenet may be sufficient for the cancer to reach an advanced stage. When this is the case, the patient will need to undergo additional treatments and will have a greatly lowered chance of living for at least five years beyond diagnosis. Subject to the laws of the jurisdiction in which the physician was responsible for the delay, this may give rise to a claim for medical malpractice, or in the most extreme case, for wrongful death.
Author Resource:-
Joseph Hernandez is an Attorney accepting cancer cases. You can learn more about
coloncancer and other cancer cases including
stage 4 breast cancer visit the website
