Video Transcript
There are numerous examples of failure to diagnose medical malpractice cases, but one of the more common ones that I’ve seen across my practice is a failure to diagnose breast cancer in a woman who goes in either for a regular mammogram, she’s doing everything right that she’s told to do, and the radiologist misses the read and the cancer is there to be seen. But because the radiologist gives the wrong report, it doesn’t get picked up until much later in time. And, of course, it also doesn’t begin treatment until much later in time. It’s also very common that a woman goes in and either complains to her gynecologist or her general practitioner that she has discovered a lump in her breast, or in a regular exam, the doctor herself or himself discovers a lump in the woman’s breast, but then doesn’t treat it with the proper index of suspicion. And they tell the woman, oh, it’s just a cyst, or, oh, it’s just benign. And instead of following it for a very short interval before referring to a surgeon to definitively diagnose it with biopsy, they just tell the woman repeatedly over time, it’s fine, don’t worry about it. And then it turns out, yes, in fact, it was cancer all along. And that delay in diagnosis, again costs precious time in catching the cancer at the earliest and smallest size and initiating treatment to stop the cancer.
