How A Doctor Might Be Responsible For Delay In Diagnosing Prostate Cancer Until It Metastasizes
By: J. Hernandez
Submitted: 2010-11-06 02:45:39 | Word Count: 471
Imagine you are a male and you see your physician for your yearly checkup. Imagine the doctor orders blood tests, including a PSA test which is used for the early diagnosis of prostate cancer. So far, so good. This is the way to determine whether a male without any symptoms of prostate cancer might actually have it. Imagine the results actually were not normal.
However, some doctors do not recommend male patients who have no symptoms to test for prostate cancer. These doctors hold that screening has little, if any, value. One factor, nevertheless, continues to be consistent. If the result of a screening test is abnormal the individual ought to be informed about the results and either be referred to a specialist or be told about the option for diagnostic testing, such as a biopsy. Once more, however, a number of physicians also believe that, at least under certain circumstances, a man who is diagnosed with prostate cancer does not need to undergo treatment immediately and merely needs to carefully monitor the cancer.
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Should this happen, the cancer becomes incurable before the patient turns symptomatic and is finally diagnosed. Unfortunately, if a physician detected that the patient's prostate was enlarged or there was a nodule on the gland and the PSA test results indicated abnormally high levels of the antigen and the doctor failed to notify the man of the abnormal results, the individual would likely think that meant there was no need to follow up.
Should the male does actually have cancer, not telling him that he may have cancer will postpone his diagnosis. A delay may, in turn, give the cancer time to metastasize. Once a cancer metastasizes treatment will at best delay the spread of the cancer and lessen the effects (like pain) of the cancer. There are malpractice claims where a physician did screen a male and the test results were abnormal yet the doctor did not inform the patient and failed to follow up.
Screening tests can yield false positives. This means that some patients with abnormal screening results will not have cancer. Yet doing screening tests for cancer is meaningless if there is no follow up as it provides the patient an incorrect sense of security believing that he has no cancer as the physician screened him but did not advise him that the tests revealed he might have cancer. Doctors typically acknowledge that there is a need for follow up when the results of screening tests come back as abnormal.
Author Resource:-
Joseph Hernandez is an attorney accepting cancer cases. Learn about prostate cancer and other cancer matters including breast cancer metastasis visit the websites
