Physician Delays Detection Of Man's Prostate Cancer By 3 Years
By: J. Hernandez
Submitted: 2010-07-13 13:00:50 | Word Count: 832
Most people think that the single concern that needs to be considered in a medical malpractice case, including one for a delayed cancer diagnosis, is if the physician committed malpracitce. Lawyers, however, recognize that there is considerably more to a medical malpractice claim than just whether the physician made a mistake. There are 2 additional issues that lawyers take into account. First, did the doctor's error cause an injury to the patient. Second, is the injury enough that it makes sense economically to pursue a lawsuit.
It is frequently easy to determine whether a physician had information, in the form of an elevated PSA test result or an abnormal digital examination, suspicious for possible prostate cancer. Figuring out the delay that resulted from the physician's position is generally determined by checking medical records for dates when the doctor either failed to follow the screening protocols or report abnormal test results, when the cancer in all likelihood started to grow, and when it was finally diagnosed.
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What may be more challenging to establish is the level of the injury to the plaintiff. Unless the PSA surpasses at least a 10.0 (a PSa reading above a 4.0 is regarded high) or a bone scan reveals the presence of metastasis, regardless of whether the cancer has a high Gleason score, most physicians would admit that it is impossible to establish the stage of the cancer without performing surgery. Studying the tissue collected during the surgery finds whether the cancer had already penetrated outside the prostate. Despite a PSA higher than a 10.0 it is nevertheless feasible that the cancer is still contained and that surgery can be curative.
Consider a malpractice claim where a physician ordered a PSA blood test on a man when the patient was 52 years old. The lab noted that the PSA level was normal. Two years later the doctor again ordered a PSA test for this patient. This time, though, the result showed that his PSA level had reached a 4.2. This was marked as elevated in the report supplied by the lab that did the blood analysis. The man went to this doctor four other times in the two and a half years which followed. His physician failed to tell him that the PSA level had been high and did not do additional PSA testing in that period. The patient next had his PSA tested by the same physician 3 years after that abnormal reading. Now the results indicated a PSA level of 5.25. It had gone up.
This was the first time the physician advised the patient about the previously elevated level. Once these results came in, the doctor sent the man to a urologist. The urologist performed a biopsy which disclosed that the man had cancer. Surgery revealed that the cancer had already spread to the seminal vesicles and there was evidence of vascular and perineal invasion. Since the cancer had by then started growing outsid the prostate, the surgery lowered his PSA level but was not curative. The patient therefore started hormone therapy. His PSA levels then began to go up post-operatively. This implies a poor prognosis so that it is unlikely that the man will live 5 years past the surgery.
The law firm that handled this claim reported that the medical malpractice case settled in the amout of $550,000 The patient was 60 years old when the claim settled The settlement agreement left the chance of a wrongful death case if the man does not live to the applicable statute of limitations.
As this case shows, the full degree of the harm to the man was not known until the results of the surgery were analyzed and showed that the cancer hadreached areas outside the prostate. Furthermore it was not until the patient's PSA levels started to go up after the surgery that the true extent of the harm could be determined. At that point the lawyer was in a position to be able to thoroughly evaluate the patient's case. An important teaching point from this case is how the law firm made sure that the man's wife did not lose the right to pursue a wrongful death claim if her husband died of the cancer within the time frame allowed by the Statute of Limitations Obviously if there will later be a wrongful death lawsuit that might be pursued will depend on several factors including whether the man will pass away from the cancer or from some other cause and if this happens during the time frame permitted by the applicable statute of limitations and statute of repose.
Author Resource:-
Joseph Hernandez is an attorney accepting cancer malpractice cases. To learn about metastatic prostate cancer and other cancer matters including breastcancer visit the websites
