Medical Malpractice: Failure to Diagnose Skin Cancer

When you go to the doctor for a diagnosis, you tend to trust that he or she will successfully locate any medical issues you have so that they can be treated. Misdiagnosis of serious diseases, or failure to diagnose them, is a terrifying – and very real – situation. In such cases, you may have a failure to diagnose medical malpractice claim on your hands.

Failure to Diagnose Skin Cancer

Failure to diagnose skin cancer is an extremely serious issue that can, and often does, result in a medical malpractice suit. If you’ve had a doctor fail to diagnose skin cancer, you may be wondering what you need in order to go ahead with a lawsuit. The answer is fairly simple, yet involves a great deal of research and work: you need to prove that the failure to diagnose was the result of negligence.

• Negligence in diagnosing something like a cancer generally means that the doctor missed signs that he or she should have seen. If you had symptoms of skin cancer that the doctor, based on training and practice, should have noticed during the diagnosing process, you may have a malpractice suit on your hands.

• Of course, the issue is proving the negligence, and just the fact that you wound up with skin cancer and the doctor didn’t diagnose it is not enough to do that. In some cases, perhaps the symptoms of your cancer were not reasonably noticeable, and the doctor had no way with his or her available equipment and testing to find them. Certainly, if you take your case to trial, this will likely be the argument given by the other side: that the doctor could not have reasonably been expected to make the diagnosis, and it being missed was not a result of him or her making a mistake, but simply a tragic consequence of the situation.

The results are, indeed, tragic: a failure to diagnose skin cancer can lead to the cancer spreading, in some cases past the stage where it will respond to treatment. This leads to the second important part of a malpractice lawsuit: proving your damages. Everything from lost work wages to pain and suffering may be put into a malpractice suit for reason of compensation. Depending on the severity of your cancer and how badly the failed diagnosis affected you and your wellbeing, the compensation for this type of mistake can involve thousands and thousands of dollars.

Getting Help 

Make no mistake: winning a medical malpractice lawsuit of this type is not easy, and requires a great deal of proof and documentation, in some cases for details that are difficult to prove or document. Your best bet is to get yourself an excellent lawyer with a background in medical malpractice, and prepare yourself for a long and difficult – but hopefully, ultimately, fair and just – journey through the court system.