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Wrong Diagnosis

Boston Wrong or Late Diagnosis Attorney

When patients go to doctors because of health complaints, they have a right to expect that their condition will be accurately diagnosed, but the Boston wrong diagnosis lawyers at Crowe & Harris, LLP are very aware of how common wrong or late diagnoses can be. In some cases, of course, a patient’s symptoms may be so general that any number of health issues may be to blame, making it difficult to make a correct diagnosis initially. However, there are many other circumstances in which a doctor should have been able to determine what was ailing a patient, but failed to. In these circumstances, a patient may face serious consequences, or even death, as a result of a wrong or delayed diagnosis.

Even with few or no symptoms, many patients should be screened for common diseases such as breast cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer, cervical cancer, diabetes, heart disease, or circulation problems. The purpose of screening is to detect problems before they cause serious harm or death. Doctors need to keep up with current recommendations and screening tests and to notify patients when screening tests are due. If proper screening isn’t done, serious medical conditions may not be diagnosed until it’s too late for effective treatment.

If you or someone you know has suffered injury or death as a result of a doctor’s wrong or delayed diagnosis of your condition, you may be entitled to compensation for the suffering and losses you have experienced. Our medical-legal staff understands how to identify medical signs and symptoms that may have been missed or ignored by a health care provider. Our Boston wrong diagnosis lawyers represent families throughout New England, including Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island.


Contact Crowe & Harris, LLP , at (617) 404-3417 today for a free consultation about your case.


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Why Choose Crowe & Harris, LLP ?

You put your trust in your doctor to take care of you. You expect them to make a responsible and accurate diagnosis of your health problems each time you visit. While our doctors are human and as such, may make mistakes, they can and should be held to a higher standard when your health and life are on the line.

Bringing a medical malpractice claim against a doctor can help prevent them from committing further acts of negligence in the future. However, a wrong diagnosis is not enough to have a successful claim. At Crowe & Harris, LLP , our attorneys can help assist you through the complicated legal procedures in a wrongful diagnosis claim. We will provide you with the experienced counsel necessary to put forth a strong, persuasive wrongful diagnosis claim.

At Crowe & Harris, LLP , we approach each claim by not having just one individual review your case, but rather a whole team of professionals. We have lawyers, nurses, legal secretaries, and more helping to help get you the best outcome possible. The legal counsel at Crowe & Harris, LLP has recovered more than $300 million in total for our clients. We have consistently been named among the Best Lawyers in America and Super Lawyers. Our team knows how to get the result our clients want to see. Contact Crowe & Harris, LLP today at (617) 404-3417. You don’t pay a single cent unless we win your case.

Commonly Misdiagnosed Conditions

Busy doctors may sometimes ignore a patient’s signs or symptoms, or simply attribute them to stress, muscle strain, heartburn, migraine, or other less serious conditions. If the doctor is wrong, the patient may suffer from serious harm or even death.

In many cases, a patient may suffer from very general symptoms, making it difficult for medical professionals to provide an accurate diagnosis regardless of competence. However, there are a number of different common conditions which have signs and symptoms identifiable enough that most medical professionals are expected to recognize them, but many often fail to do so. Some of these include the following:

Cancer

A missed cancer diagnosis or incorrect diagnosis can have terrible consequences. If a cancer goes undiagnosed, it goes untreated, meaning chances of it becoming worse or spreading are increased dramatically. If your doctor failed to diagnose your cancer, you may be able to seek compensation. Our Boston wrong diagnosis lawyers can help you through this complicated process.

Heart Attack

A heart attack is one of the most serious physical threats a person can face medically. With a correct and timely diagnosis, a heart attack might be treated, but if this diagnosis is incorrect or not made quickly, then the person suffering the heart attack faces imminent and life-threatening danger.

Not getting the right diagnosis, or getting it too late, when one has a heart attack can be deadly. Unfortunately, due to the many effects of a heart attack, a person who has a delayed or wrong diagnosis may find themselves facing the following burdensome costs:

  • Additional medical treatment
  • Medical devices
  • Lost wages
  • Therapy expenses

Sadly, far too many people fall victim to these undue costs as a result of a medical error or negligence.

Orthopedic Injuries

An orthopedic injury is one that refers to an injury affecting a person’s muscles, joints, ligaments, or skeletal system. These injuries can be extremely painful and, if not diagnosed accurately and in a timely manner, can even cause permanent damage to the injured person. Unfortunately, errors in the diagnosis process happen all too often in the medical industry, causing patients to have a delayed diagnosis of an orthopedic injury or for it to be misdiagnosed entirely.

Some of the more common orthopedic injuries include:

  • ACL tears
  • Tendinitis
  • Arthritis
  • Bursitis
  • Chronic joint pain
  • MCL tears
  • Stress fracture
  • Trigger finger
  • Plantar fasciitis
  • Osteoporosis

In order for a person with these or other orthopedic injuries to receive the treatment they need to properly recover, a timely and accurate diagnosis is critical.

Complications Arising from an Orthopedic Injury Misdiagnosis

A person with a misdiagnosed orthopedic injury may experience a range of unwanted complications, including:

  • Pain and discomfort
  • Permanent joint damage
  • Nerve injuries
  • Skeletal deformities
  • Paralysis

These complications are easily preventable. Failure to properly diagnose an injury can be considered negligence on the part of the treating physician. If you are suffering from a medical complication due to an improper orthopedic injury diagnosis, you should seek legal action.

Infection

Infections can occur quickly and as the result of various factors, such as a surgical complication or coming into contact with bacteria. Additionally, infections can quickly become a very serious health problem, if not life-threatening. As such, getting a quick and accurate diagnosis can make the difference between recovering from an infection and suffering severe health problems. Unfortunately, many medical professionals fail to properly diagnose an infection in a timely manner, causing innocent people to suffer unduly.

When infections go untreated due to a wrong or delayed diagnosis, they can cause a variety of health problems, including:

  • Discharge from a wound
  • Contagion
  • Nausea / vomiting
  • Lethargy / fatigue
  • Diarrhea
  • Weight loss
  • Dehydration
  • Organ damage / failure
  • Fatality

Unfortunately, many patients and their families are forced to endure these repercussions of an infection due to irresponsible medical professionals.

Recovering Damages for the Late Diagnosis of Infection

The consequences of a late diagnosis, or a misdiagnosis, can be devastating for victims and their families. However, you do not have to face the consequences of such negligence alone, as our legal team may help you recover the damages you sustained as the result of your physician’s malpractice, including:

  • The cost of medical care
  • Loss of income
  • Any pain and suffering associated with the incident

Negligent medical practitioners should be held fully accountable when their carelessness results in a worsened health condition in patients.

Meningitis

Meningitis is a very serious condition that affects a person’s brain and spinal cord. There are five main types of meningitis – bacterial, viral, parasitic, fungal, and non-infectious – all of which can have severe, if not fatal, effects on the people who contract them. Because of the quickness with which this condition affects people and the potential fatality of the infection, getting a timely and accurate diagnosis is absolutely critical to a person’s outcome and survival.

Tragically, reckless and negligent medical professionals do not always provide this correct and timely diagnosis, causing meningitis victims to suffer further harm, including permanent disability. A late diagnosis of meningitis can cause a person to suffer from a number of side effects, such as:

  • Memory loss
  • Persistent and serious headaches
  • Changes in vision
  • Hearing problems
  • Learning difficulties
  • Speech difficulties / muddled speech
  • Epilepsy/seizures

These complications of meningitis might permanently affect a person or, tragically, result in their death.

Aneurysm

Arteries perform numerous critical services throughout the body, including supplying blood to the brain. A weakness in the artery wall is referred to as an aneurysm. Since this condition is extremely dangerous, it needs be monitored closely by a physician. If a medical professional fails to detect or diagnose an aneurysm, it could cost a patient their life. Unfortunately, wrong or late diagnoses do often occur, and the Boston aneurysm attorneys at Crowe & Harris, LLP , are dedicated to helping patients who have suffered because of such serious medical errors.

In the event that a doctor fails to detect or diagnose an aneurysm, a patient could suffer from the following:

  • Brain damage
  • Coma
  • Memory loss
  • Lost cognitive skills
  • Lost mobility skills
  • Fatality

Unfortunately, treating an aneurysm and its after-effects can be quite expensive and is often beyond the financial means of many people.

Internal Bleeding

Internal bleeding is an invisible but often life-threatening condition. For this reason, it is incredibly important that internal bleeding be detected as soon as possible in order to be stopped. Sadly, in far too many cases, doctors and other medical professionals neglect the needs of patients and misdiagnose internal bleeding in time.

It may be hard for a person to know right away that he or she has internal bleeding, but a doctor should be able to tell through appropriate testing (not to mention his or her medical background). Some of the symptoms of internal bleeding include:

  • Abdominal pain
  • Headache / lost consciousness
  • Light-headedness/dizziness
  • Swelling in the legs / pain in thighs
  • Skin color changes (especially purplish color)

These symptoms could indicate that a person is suffering from internal bleeding, and needs the help of a doctor to properly diagnose the condition. But if that doctor makes a mistake, the results could be devastating.

If you believe that a medical care provider failed to identify these or other conditions in you or a loved one, do not hesitate to take action.

Proving Wrongful Diagnosis

As stated earlier, a wrong diagnosis does not mean that the doctor can be held legally responsible for his or her actions. There are three things that need to be proved in order to have a successful wrongful diagnosis claim:

  1. The doctor-patient relationship existed between the plaintiff and the defendant.
  2. The doctor was negligent; this does not mean that he or she only provided the wrong diagnosis.
  3. The doctor’s negligence caused actual harm to the patient.

Proving the first element will be easy. The second and third elements are usually what will determine whether or not your claim will be successful.

How to Determine Negligence

Even the best doctors using the utmost level of care will provide diagnoses that are wrong from time to time. This is why a wrong diagnosis is not enough for a successful claim in court. The key things to look at when determining the doctor’s negligence are as follows:

  • Was the doctor using reasonable care?
  • What did the doctor do to get to the wrong diagnosis?
  • What did the doctor fail to do?
  • Was the doctor acting within the standards of the medical community?

Essentially, the patient would need to prove that an ordinary doctor of the same skill in the same or similar circumstances would have diagnosed the patient correctly. The plaintiff can prove this by showing that the doctor did not include the correct diagnosis on the diagnostic test and that a reasonable doctor would have. Alternatively, the plaintiff can prove negligence by showing that the doctor did include the correct diagnosis on the diagnostic test, but did not perform the correct tests. Determining negligence can be tricky, and an experienced lawyer will help you analyze your particular case.

Did the Misdiagnosis Cause You Harm?

Actual harm must also result from the wrong diagnosis. For a delayed diagnosis, the patient must prove that the condition got far worse than it would have gotten if the diagnosis had not been delayed and that the worsened condition is causing the treatment to be less effective. Just because a patient can be treated successfully does not always mean that there is no actual harm. A patient can prove harm in other forms, including medical problems, expenses from additional treatment that wouldn’t be required if the diagnosis was correct, stress, and anxiety.

Find Out If You Have a Case Today

The Boston wrong diagnosis lawyers at Crowe & Harris, LLP are ready to defend your legal rights. You are more than just a client to us. We will provide you with legal help that is tailored to you and your case. When a wrong diagnosis happens, it can turn your life upside down. We know the worry and suffering you may be experiencing, and we want to help right the wrongs that have happened to you. Our attorneys will work day in and day out to make sure you get the compensation you’re entitled to.

If you or someone you know has suffered injury or death caused by a medical provider’s wrong or late diagnosis, we may be able to help you find out more about what happened and whether you are entitled to compensation.


Contact a Boston medical malpractice lawyer at Crowe & Harris, LLP , today at (617) 404-3417 for a free consultation with an experienced member of our medical-legal team.


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