Washington Misdiagnosis Lawyer
In a 2008 study in the American Journal of Medicine, it was discovered that 10-15 percent of patients are diagnosed incorrectly by medical professionals. According to the Institute of Medicine, every year as many as 98,000 deaths and over one million injuries occur in the United States because of medical errors. Many of these injuries and deaths could have been prevented had the medical professionals given the patient a higher quality of care.
A misdiagnosis is a medical error that can occur when a doctor or health care worker fails to take the proper amount of time with a patient or is careless when observing symptoms. It can occur when a doctor or health care worker brushes off a patient's complaints, ignores a prevailing symptoms that does not fit an easy to diagnosis disease, or rushes through laboratory tests.
HealthGrades performed a study of Patient Safety Incidents (PSI) and found that the most common cause of PSIs was failure to diagnose and treat patients in a timely manner. The report showed that 155 per 1,000 hospitalized patients file PSIs for this reason. You may have been misdiagnosed if your symptoms do not match the cause your doctor gave you, or if after several treatments your symptoms are not subsiding or are getting worse. Your misdiagnosis may even come from inaccurate lab results.
Davenport University listed the top five malpractice-risk conditions in order of prevalence as myocardial infarction, breast cancer, appendicitis, lung cancer and colon cancer. The university's study discovered that almost all cases filed were a result of misdiagnosis or mismanaged diagnostic tests leading that slowed the treatment process.
Not every misdiagnosis will result in a malpractice case. Some misdiagnoses are caught in time and result in no harm to the patient. Sometimes misdiagnoses occur even though doctors have exhausted every avenue to try to help their client. A successful malpractice case must begin by proving that the health care provider's mistakes or oversights were directly responsible for the negative outcomes the patient experienced.
If you have been misdiagnosed, it is still important for you to seek additional treatment to lessen the chance of future injuries. You may not be eligible to be reimbursed for future damages that could have been prevented by seeking medical attention. In order to protect your health and preserve your legal rights, you should seek medical attention as soon as you are aware that you have been misdiagnosed.
