Cancer is one of the last diagnoses that people want to receive from their doctors. Even when they know it might be a possibility, they usually go in for diagnostic testing hoping that something else caused their symptoms.
Unfortunately, cancer is relatively common. Advances in modern medicine have made it substantially more treatable than it was just a few decades ago. Childhood leukemia and breast cancer were once essentially death sentences for people, but now the potential for a full recovery is there.
Chemotherapy, radiation, surgical tumor excision and immunotherapies may all offer a chance at remission. Unfortunately, doctors don’t always diagnose patients accurately. People may not want a cancer diagnosis, but they need a timely diagnosis if cancer is the cause of their symptoms. The three issues below may arise after the delayed diagnosis of cancer.
1. Increased mortality
The tragic reality is that many delayed cancer diagnoses don’t come to light until the patient dies. They sought care or diagnostic evaluation but never received the right diagnosis or effective treatment. It is only during postmortem examinations that forensic specialists identify the cancer that likely caused their death. A delay in diagnosis or a failure to diagnose may lead to a patient dying from a cancer they could have survived with treatment.
2. Reduced treatment options
Some of the best cancer interventions require early-stage treatment. For example, immunotherapies are often most effective in stage 1 or stage 2 of cancer development. They may be less useful once the cancer begins to metastasize or spread to other parts of the body. Patients may have few options other than to undergo more aggressive, systemic treatments when a doctor doesn’t diagnose them when they first start reporting their symptoms.
3. Protracted illness and treatment
The longer it takes a doctor to diagnose a patient’s cancer, the longer they may struggle to perform their job and daily tasks. People may lose their employment due to their declining productivity. Even if the cancer doesn’t prevent them from working and caring for themselves, the treatment that they have to undergo after a delayed diagnosis could leave them unable to work or live independently. A delayed diagnosis can significantly increase the secondary costs associated with cancer, including lost wages and the need for caregiver support.
Patients may have grounds for a medical malpractice lawsuit if another physician should have ordered testing or reached the right diagnosis with the information they provided to their physician. Holding doctors accountable for negligently failing to diagnose cancer can help people harmed by medical malpractice.