Failure to Diagnose Cancer – Can You Sue?

Do you want to learn whether or not you can sue a doctor for failing to diagnose cancer? First, let’s discuss what failure to diagnose is and explore your options for suing for malpractice and medical damages.

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Video Transcript

Timestamps
0:00 Intro
0:20 Failure to Diagnose Cancer
1:30 Monetary and Medical Damages

Yeah, and in terms of cancers that are not timely diagnosed, can you sue? Well, the answer is you might expect, would probably be the case in many questions, is maybe.

0:20 Failure to Diagnose Cancer

Again, it boils down to whether you were damaged and whether you have damages, and whether the failure to diagnose can reasonably be linked through the chain of causation to those damages.

If the failure to diagnose caused the damages and the damages are from a monetary standpoint significant, then that case is worth pursuing.

I have to point out that some cases, even though negligence may have occurred economically, are simply not worth the cost of pursuing.

If you have an ingrown toenail and maybe it’s not timely treated, and you end up with what’s called a perinecium or an abscess around your toenail, that can be treated very simply for very little money. And although there may have been a delay, the money actually spent to treat that abnormality is so low, that the economics simply don’t add up to any reason to file a lawsuit.

1:30 Monetary and Medical Damages

On the other hand, in the case of the orthopedic surgeon I mentioned, when you start talking about surgical treatment and hospitalization in an intensive care unit, and months of inability to work, those damages add up and make for an economic situation where a lawsuit is much more feasible than the case of where damages are minimal.