Doctors must treat patients with the utmost care. Part of a doctor’s responsibility is to ensure patients receive the necessary testing to diagnose a condition accurately. The doctor must monitor the patient’s symptoms, provide a thorough examination, and determine what illness or ailment with which the patient is dealing.
From there, they must provide treatment to help the patient recover.
Unfortunately, issues can exist from the very beginning, and a doctor may not correctly diagnose the patient’s condition. Misdiagnosis is a common problem in medical malpractice matters, and it’s a situation that often leads to long-term—even fatal—issues.
How Does Misdiagnosis Occur?
Many conditions have overlapping symptoms. For instance, a severe cough can mean multiple conditions. It’s up to the doctor to go through various tests to provide a diagnosis correctly. Proper testing doesn’t always happen, and doctors may diagnose the patient with a less severe condition when the patient is dealing with a life-threatening disease.
Failure to provide proper testing on a patient is one of the biggest causes of misdiagnosis. In some situations, this isn’t something that has devastating results. In other cases, patients fail to receive treatment for their condition, and it can worsen over time.
What is the Worst-Case Scenario?
Misdiagnosis of life-threatening conditions like cancer can have detrimental consequences. Cancer is something that doctors must treat in the early stages to give the patient the best possible prognosis. Failure to diagnose cancer accurately can leave the condition to progress into the later stages, which is often too late to cure.
A patient must receive treatment promptly. Accurate diagnosis is crucial to survival, and a misdiagnosis can be deadly.
Parker Alexander represents patients after a misdiagnosis. These patients are either left to suffer without proper treatment or receive treatment they didn’t need. Both situations can cause the patient to sustain significant harm at the hands of a negligent medical professional.
Our Monroe medical malpractice lawyers work diligently to help pursue compensation when doctors fail to do their jobs. We’ll go the extra mile when it comes to justice, and our clients can feel confident in our abilities to safeguard their rights moving forward.
Contact us today at (318) 625-6262 for a free consultation.