What Is The Most Common Reason for Medical Malpractice?

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Video Transcript

Timestamps
0:00 Intro
0:21 Failure to Diagnose

0:21 Failure to Diagnose

What are the most common reasons for medical malpractice? Almost universally, the most common reason for medical malpractice is failure to diagnose a condition that needs prompt treatment. It might be the failure to diagnose cancer, it might be the failute to diagnose a stroke, it might be the failure to diagnose a heart attack, is very common examples.

Let me use the failure to diagnose cancer for this discussion. Patients, colon cancer frequently shows itself as one of its first symptoms like blood in the stool when the patient has a bowel movement. Patient notices that of course, they recognize it’s not normal, they go to their doctor. 

In too many cases, that doctor does not do the appropriate examination, doesn’t take the appropriate history, doesn’t do the necessary tests. A test like that would be, first of all asking about when this blood occurred, is it bright red blood, is it black and tarry? When did it come on, how long does it last? Taking an adequate history. Many doctors just passed right over that. Many negligent doctors I should say.

Failure to do an examination, any patient who presents with bright red blood in their stool, male or female, needs a rectal examination. You need to see if there’s a cancer there that you can feel because cancers of the rectum are often, you can feel them with your finger. Something as simple as that, done in the office, can establish the need for further testing and diagnosis very promptly.

And it’s very important of course because the earlier the diagnosis occurs, the sooner the treatment can be instituted. And the idea of course is to catch that cancer when it’s at a highly curable stage. So delays in treatment can make a big difference.

The doctor may not do the necessary testing. And if the patient is in the right age group, obviously a sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy are essential for the diagnosis as well. And it may be further studies, like a barium enema, Xrays need to be done too.

Failure to do those things, do the adequate history, fair to do an adequate physical examination, test the stool for blood, do a rectal examination, do a colonoscopy, those are breaches in the standard of care. And if they delay the diagnosis by six months or a year, that cancer grows, and it can become incurable, spreading to the lymph nodes and the belly and to the liver. And the treatment is completely different, and unfortunately, the results are far less satisfactory. That’s a classic example of breach of negligence when it comes to a patient with rectal or colon cancer.

There are many, many other examples. Once again, if you have any questions or you want to discuss this further, we are delighted to discuss your case with you.