Misdiagnosis is a common form of medical malpractice. According to studies, doctors make a mistake with diagnoses at an estimated rate of 5.08% per year.
Doctors undergo years of training to learn how to properly evaluate patients and reach their diagnosis. However, even minor mistakes can have serious consequences.
Delays in Diagnosis and Treatment
Even a minor misdiagnosis can have serious consequences. A person may have to endure unnecessary pain, undergo invasive procedures, lose wages, and incur expensive medical bills for treatment they could have avoided had a doctor correctly diagnosed their condition.
A misdiagnosis is a form of medical malpractice, though not every case involving a diagnostic error qualifies as such. To prove malpractice, you must show that a doctor failed to act with reasonable care in diagnosing your illness or injury.
Your doctor must use all of the information at their disposal to make a proper diagnosis. Often, this requires the careful review of your entire health history. However, errors resulting from miscommunication, improper testing, or faulty equipment can result in a wrong diagnosis. Depending on the circumstances, this negligence can lead to life-threatening complications or death. For example, a missed or delayed cancer diagnosis can allow the disease to spread to the point that it becomes untreatable.
Pain and Suffering
In addition to the physical suffering of a medical condition, patients may experience mental anguish and distress when their doctor makes a mistake. These feelings are often referred to as “pain and suffering.”
If you have been misdiagnosed, the medical professional who made the error should be held accountable for your injuries. You may be entitled to compensation for your physical, emotional, and financial losses.
Physicians are required to provide a high standard of care when treating their patients. This includes providing an accurate diagnosis of the condition that they are seeing. If they breach this duty of care and you are injured as a result, you may have a medical malpractice case. In order to prove this, you will need to demonstrate that another physician would have made the correct diagnosis in the same circumstances. For example, if a doctor sees that you have migraines when you really have the flu, they would not be considered to have breached their duty of care because you were already suffering from the flu.
Delays in Obtaining Treatment
In some cases, a wrong diagnosis or delayed diagnosis can result in unnecessarily prolonged treatment periods or surgeries. This can cause measurable losses, which are known as damages.
A medical misdiagnosis lawyer can help you establish that you suffered some form of economic or non-economic loss. The most obvious example is the cost of medication that didn’t work or even made your condition worse. Other measurable costs include lost wages from missed work, the need to hire a caregiver, or the cost of other necessary expenses.
In addition, your Chicago wrong diagnosis attorney can prove that your doctor failed to properly evaluate your case by creating a list of conditions that might be responsible for your symptoms—a process called differential diagnosis. Your doctor may also have failed to take into account your age, gender, and other factors that make some illnesses or injuries more common in certain patient populations. This makes them more likely to be overlooked or misdiagnosed than others.
Damages
In some cases, a medical misdiagnosis can have life-threatening consequences. For example, if a doctor dismisses stomach pain as gas and does not order a colonoscopy, the patient could miss the opportunity to receive a timely diagnosis for colorectal cancer and potentially die from a more advanced stage of the disease or complications of treatment.
Missed or incorrect diagnoses are the most common type of medical malpractice claim and result in serious harm or death. Between 1986 and 2010, diagnosis-related payments made up over half of all malpractice payouts.
A successful misdiagnosis lawsuit seeks compensation for a variety of damages, including long-term health problems, pain and suffering, lost income, and incurred expenses from medical treatments. The amount of damages you might be entitled to may depend on the type of error, the extent to which it was harmful, and other factors involving the specific case. An experienced medical malpractice attorney can help you evaluate the damage and make a proper claim for compensation.