Physician Pays Out $1,250,000 To Family Of Patient Who Passed Away After Delay Of Years Before Detection Of Colon Cancer
By: J. Hernandez
Submitted: 2010-08-30 10:37:48 | Word Count: 580
Colon cancers sometimes bleed. Under some circumstances, the blood might be visible in the stool. When the cancer is close to the rectum, the blood may even show up as bright red. Even though the blood cannot be seen, it may nonetheless be possible to determine that the individual is bleeding in other ways. For instance, the loss of blood might manifest as anemia. Blood tests might reveal internal loss of blood that may be the result of cancer in the colon. The key blood test results to evaluate include the hemoglobin, hematocrit, and Mean Corpuscular Volume (MCV) levels. Low levels may suggest blood loss and iron deficiency anemia. When a person presents with levels that are low for these tests physicians commonly agree that there should be additional testing to discover the cause of the blood loss, like the chance of cancer of the colon.
Look at the matter of a sixty four year old man whose blood tests exhibited all of the above. The next year, the person's blood work revealed a worsening of the person's condition. Furthermore, a guaiac test revealed that there was blood in the patient's stool. Without any more testing, the man's doctor wrote a diagnosis of hemorrhoids into the patient's record. Moreover, the patient's PSA level (a test that is used to screen males for prostate cancer) was a 10.3 (a level above a 4.0 is usually deemed high and worrisome for prostate cancer). The doctor made no mention in the patient's record to document an examination of the prostate gland. The physician failed to inform him about the high PSA levels and did not refer the individual to a specialist.
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Roughly 2 years later the person went to another doctor. Because of the individual's age this doctor had him undergo a barium enema. The result: a diagnosis of advanced colon cancer. The individual died of the spread of the cancer less than 3 years after his diagnosis. The individual's family filed a lawsuit against the physician who ignored the patient's abnormally low blood test results and dismissed the presence of blood in the man's stool. The law firm that represented the family was able to report that it settled for $1.25 million.
Blood tests are done for a reason. Abnormal test outcomes are indicators that there may be something wrong, maybe even critically wrong with the patient and require follow up. Sometimes follow up means repeating the blood test within a short period of time to see whether the levels improve. However, if the levels deviate enough from normal levels or keep getting worse, physicians generally acknowledge that this increases the importance of ordering appropriate supplemental tests to determine the explanation for those levels. Doctors further usually acknowledge that blood in the stool of an adult individual mandates fast attention to eliminate the possibility of colon cancer as the reason. A colonoscopy is often used to examine all the colon and either locate or exclude the existence of any tumors. This physician failed to dor any of this.
Author Resource:-
Joseph Hernandez is an Attorney accepting medical malpractice cases. To learn about
coloncancer and other cancer cases including
prostatecancer visit the website
