Dallas Medical Malpractice Attorneys | Failure to Diagnose and Wrongful Death

A full 40% of the cases filed over physician malpractice are cases where failure to diagnose was the specific type of negligence that led to either more suffering or outright death for a patient. These types of cases can occur in many ways, and they may involve situations that you may not normally think of. It's obvious enough that, if a physician failed to diagnose a condition like cancer, the condition could worsen to levels that could be threats to the life of the patient. There are other ways these types of cases come about, however.

In some cases, emergency care for an individual who is in a crisis situation may not be given because paramedics, nurses or physicians fail to diagnose that there is actually a crisis in progress. For example, if you went to the emergency room and were presenting the symptoms of stroke and weren't given treatment that could've prevented you from having a stroke that actually occurred, you may end up in court suing the party responsible for your pain and suffering and your medical expenses.

There are some cases where a physician cannot be reasonably expected to notice a condition. For instance, some people neglect to have certain types of medical tests run, sometimes out of fear that they may be harboring a condition that they'd rather not know about. As an example of this, if you are an ex-smoker and your physician was constantly after you to get chest x-rays done and you refused to have them done, you really couldn't blame the physician if any lung cancer you had was at an advanced stage before it was even found. If you had chest x-rays done, however, and the physician neglected to notice a stage I cancer that developed into a stage III cancer, you may well have a lawsuit.

Patients play a role in their own healthcare. A doctor, however, has a duty to provide accurate diagnoses and to provide the best healthcare possible to treat any conditions that they discover. If your physician didn't give you adequate attention or didn't run tests that should have been run and you found yourself in a healthcare crisis because of that, you may wish to speak with an attorney who specializes in these cases. An attorney will be the only one who can determine whether or not you have a lawsuit that's likely to win.