Once multiple doctors take part in the treatment of a patient it might be very important for the doctors to relay important diagnostic results as well as follow-up and treatment suggestions to the patient and other doctors. The need for such communication is not necessarily negated due to the fact the patient fails to go back to one of the doctors. It gets more problematic, however, when the one doctor who is on the right track does not communicate his or her suspicions and the other physicians are missing the signs and not ordering the correct tests.
Consider the following reported lawsuit. A number of physicians had a chance to detect the male patient's prostate cancer before it spread The man first saw his primary care physician (PCP), a general practitioner, with complaints of urinary problems at 56 years old age. The primary care physician decided that the problems were not due to cancer even though no testing was done to rule out cancer.
Ten months later the patient consulted with a urologist who did a physical examination on the prostate gland and ordered a PSA blood test. The patient then discovered that the urologist was not approved by his insurance and he went to a different urologist who was approved. Although the blood test results came in neither the results of the test nor the first urologist's suspicion of cancer and advice that a biopsy be carried out were communicated to the individual's family doctor or to his second urologist. The approved urologist did not order a PSA blood test. The approved urologist also carried out a physical examination of the prostate but did not find any abnormalities and so concluded that the patient did not have cancer.
As a result the cancer went undiagnosed for two years by which point it had spread beyond the prostate. By that time, the cancer had spread beyond the prostate and had metastasized. Had the cancer been diagnosed when the patient initially told his doctors that he had urinary problems, when he saw the first urologist, or even when he saw the second urologist, it would have still been contained in the prostate and, with treatment, the patient would have had approximately 97% chance of surviving the cancer. Given that the cancer was by now advanced at the time of diagnosis, however, the patient was not expected to live more than five years. The law firm that handled this case reported that they were able to obtain a settlement during jury selection at trial in the amount of $2.5 million on behalf of the patient.
As the case described above shows, having more than one physician for the same issue can result in multiple errors. The first mistake consisted of not following the screening guidelines. This was a mistake committed by both the PCP and the second urologist. The other error was one in communication. This occurred when there was a miscommunication of the findings, suspicions, and recommendations of the urologist who was outside the insurance network and the other physicians. If the patient had been able to keep seeing the first urologist the patient would have known that cancer was a possibility and that a follow up biopsy was appropriate. Whether the other doctors would have agreed with that recommendation or would have communicated this information to the patient if they had received it is unknown but then the error would have been entirely theirs.
Author Resource:-
Joseph Hernandez is an attorney accepting cancer malpractice cases. To learn about metastatic prostate cancer and other cancer matters including breast cancer metastasis visit the websites
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