By: J. Hernandez
Submitted: 2010-11-23 22:48:29 | Word Count: 863
When individuals approach lawyers with regards to a cancer case, they virtually always prefer to begin by speaking about what the doctor did wrong. Lawyers, however, comprehend that there is far more to a medical malpractice case than just if the physician erred. There are 2 additional factors that attorneys take into account. First, did the doctor's error cause an injury to the individual. Second, is the injury sufficient that it makes sense economically to pursue a claim.
It is frequently easy to figure out if a physician had information, in the form of a heigh PSA test result or an abnormal digital examination, which would indicate possible prostate cancer. It is often not that difficult to ascertain how much of a delay was caused by the physician's mistake. The delay is normally the time that passed between when the individual was diagnosed and when the doctor first had the information about the abnormal PSA or digital examination results.
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What might be more difficult to establish is the extent of the harm to the patient. Except if the PSA exceeds at least a 10.0 (anything above a 4.0 is considered elevated) or a bone scan discloses sign of metastasis, even if the cancer has a high Gleason score, the majority of physicians would admit that it is impossible to determine the stage of the cancer without performing surgery. The examination of the tissue collected in the course of the surgery finds whether the cancer had already penetrated outside the prostate. Even with a PSA higher than a 10.0 it is nevertheless feasible that the cancer has not penetrated outside the prostate and that surgery can be curative.
Consider a lawsuit where a doctor performed a PSA blood test on a male patient when the patient was 52 years old. The PSA level was 2.0 at that time. This level is generally considered to be normal. The man's PSA level was retested by the same physician 2 years after that. This time, though, the result indicated that his PSA level had reached a 4.2. This was marked as elevated in the record provided by the lab that did the blood analysis. The patient went to this doctor four other times in the two and a half years which followed. His doctor failed to tell him that the PSA level had been high and failed to do additional PSA testing in that period. The man next had his PSA tested by the same physician three years after that abnormal reading. At that time the results showed a PSA level of 5.25. The PSA level had risen.
It was only at this point that the physician informed the patient of the prior elevated level. At this time, the doctor sent the man to a urologist. The urologist performed a biopsy which revealed that the man had cancer. Surgery disclosed that the cancer had already reached beyond the prostate to the seminal vesicles and there was also vascular and perineal invasion. Seeing as the cancer had already began spreading beyond the prostate, the surgery lowered his PSA level but was not able to take out all the cancer. The patient thus underwent hormone therapy. His PSA levels then began to go up post-operatively. This implies a poor prognosis making it unlikely that the man will survive 5 years past the surgery.
The law firm that handled this case documented that they achieved a settlement in excess of half a million dollars on behalf of the man and his family. The man was sixty years old at the time of the settlement. The settlement agreement left the possibility of a wrongful death lawsuit if the man does not live to the relevant statute of limitations.
As this claim illustrates, the full degree of the injury to the patient was not known until the results of the surgery were analyzed and confirmed that the cancer had, in fact, already begun spreading beyond the prostate. Furthermore it was not until the patient's PSA levels started to increase after the surgery that the full extent of the injury could be determined. At that point the attorney was in a position to be able to completely 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 whether there will later be a wrongful death case that may be pursued is determined by a number of factors like whether the man will pass away from the cancer or because of 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 prostate cancer and other cancer matters including colon cancer metastasis visit the websites
