Man Settles With Doctors For 2,500,000 After Finding Out He Had With Advanced Prostate Cancer While For Years Physicians Knew About His Symptoms And Abnormal Test Results
By: J. Hernandez
Submitted: 2010-10-27 17:18:13 | Word Count: 623
Coordinating the care of a patient might literally make the difference between life and death. The participation of several doctors in the treatment of a patient raises the risk that some doctors may have essential information that ought to be relayed to the patient and the other physicians for necessary follow up. Without it the patient may go on without proper and needed treatment. When the patient is informed of every/all the doctor's conclusions and the reasoning behind those conclusions the at least the patient can reach an informed decision based on his or her level of risk tolerance. A failure to do so may result in an undiagnosed or untreated disease or condition. And it might be medical negligence.
One such situation happened in the following reported case. A number of doctors had an opportunity to detect the male patient's prostate cancer before it spread The man first went to his primary care physician, a general practitioner, with complaints of urinary problems when he was fifty-six years old. The family physician thought that the man's problems were not a result of cancer. As a result, the family doctor did not order any diagnostic testing, for example a biopsy and failed to refer the individual to a urologist.
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The man, on his own, visited a urologist ten months later. The urologist carried out a physical examination of the prostate and ordered a PSA blood test. As it turned out this urologist did not practice in the patient's insurance network and so the patient consulted with a second urologist.
The PSA test ordered by the first urologist came back and that urologist advised a biopsy. Unfortunately, that recommendation apparently did not get related to the PCP or the urologist approved by the insurance company. The authorized urologist did not order a PSA blood test. The approved urologist also carried out a physical examination of the prostate but found no abnormalities and so concluded that the patient did not have cancer.
Consequently the cancer went undiagnosed for 2 years by which point it had spread beyond the prostate. By that point, the cancer had spread beyond the prostate and was now advanced. Had the cancer been detected at the time the patient initially complained of urinary problems, when he saw the first urologist, or even when he saw the second urologist, it would not have yet spread and, with treatment, the patient would have had approximately 97 percent likelihood of surviving the cancer. Since the cancer was already advanced at the time of diagnosis, however, the patient was likely to die from the cancer in under five years. The law firm that helped the patient documented that the resulting medical malpractice lawsuit settled for $2,500,000.
This claim thus demonstrates 2 key types of failures. There was the failure on the part of the PCP and the second urologist to not follow the proper screening guidelines. Additionally there was the failure of communication among the several physicians. While it is impossible to know whether the general practitioner or the second urologist would have followed up on results of the PSA test from the first urologist or on that urologist's suspicion and recommendation they at a minimum would have had information and perspective they were missing.
Author Resource:-
Joseph Hernandez is an attorney accepting cancer malpractice cases. To learn about metastatic prostate cancer and other cancer matters including breast cancer visit the websites
