Can you bring a lawsuit for wrong diagnosis? Even if the problem was a failure to diagnose?
Yes. A failure to diagnosis can be the grounds for a malpractice claim, as can other diagnosis-related issues, such as mistakenly diagnosing one disease as another.
Medical Malpractice: The Basics
Something you've probably heard before: the fact that treatment did not work does not necessarily prove malpractice or establish liability. As good as modern medicine is, it's not perfect, and sometimes the doctor and everyone else does everything right and they still can't help a patient. Malpractice occurs when a medical provider fails to live up to the accepted standards of medical care. This can occur for a variety of reasons, but the most common is carelessness, or negligence. When a lack of care results in injury, there might be malpractice.
There must also be harm for there to be a malpractice lawsuit--some injury, for which the courts can provide compensation. In wrongful diagnosis cases, the injury typically results from the delay in treatment, allowing a condition to worsen unnecessarily.
Types of Wrong Diagnosis
One of the most common kinds is what in other contexts is known as a "false negative": the doctor does not spot some illness or condition and tells a patient that they are healthy when they are not. This often occurs when a doctor simply doesn't look or listen closely to the patient's symptoms or what the patient tells him. This often happens with cancer, when doctors ignore early warning signs that would let the disease be treated before it takes hold.
Another common kind of wrong diagnosis is diagnosising one disease or condition as another, so the real problem goes untreated (the patient may also suffer from the effects of an unnecessary treatment). This is often the case with appendicitis, heart attacks, and other conditions where interior pains can be attributed to much-less-serous causes, such as heartburn.
A third kind would be the "false positive": a healthy patient is told he's sick. Here, the harm comes from the effects (and cost) of necessary treatment.
How an Attorney Can Help
Any malpractice case is complex, but wrongful diagnosis cases are often the most difficult, as they sometimes involve "proving a negative"--showing that harm resulted because of what was NOT done. An attorney can help an injured patient understand if he or she has a wrongful diagnosis case worth pursuing, so they can get the compensation to which they are entitled.
