Failure to Diagnose Medical Malpractice Injury Lawyers in Houston

You trust your doctor to take your concerns seriously, perform the right tests and provide thorough, detail-oriented care. The faith patients place in their healthcare providers is sacred – and the added responsibility is reflected in law through a strict duty of care. People are supposed to be able to trust their doctors because medical concerns can literally be matters of life or death.

When doctors fail to perform the proper due diligence and their patients suffer more severe illnesses or complications as a result, those medical professionals should be held liable for the resulting medical costs, lost wages and pain and suffering the patient and their family endure.

The team at the Weycer Law Firm is committed to ensuring Houston patients get justice for medical malpractice in all its forms, including failure to diagnose.

What Exactly Is Failure to Diagnose?

The failure to diagnose category of medical malpractice covers a few different scenarios, including:

• Missed diagnosis
• Delayed diagnosis
• Wrong diagnosis

While related, each of these behaviors constitutes a slightly different set of facts, with some being potentially worse than others.

A missed diagnosis occurs when a healthcare provider entirely misses the symptoms of a condition altogether, leading to a total lack of treatment.

A delayed diagnosis implies that an ailment was eventually correctly diagnosed, but at a later point where the ailment was either harder, more painful or more expensive to treat, or late enough that treatment options were limited or ineffective. One of the more common examples is cancer, where a missed diagnosis of a patient with stage one could have fatal consequences.

A wrong diagnosis can be more complicated since it implies the doctor did see the symptoms, took them seriously and arrived at the incorrect conclusion.

The severity of the mistake doesn’t necessarily impact the outcome of a claim. The value of your claim is typically tied to the effects the medical malpractice had on your life. A missed diagnosis of a relatively minor ailment may rise to the level of malpractice, but the total cost in terms of lost wages, extra medical bills and pain and suffering might not justify a claim.

An experienced Houston medical malpractice attorney can help you understand whether your situation constitutes a failure to diagnose and help you understand the next steps.

Why Are Diagnostic Mistakes and Failure to Diagnose So Common?

Diagnostic failures happen every day – but not every diagnostic failure constitutes medical malpractice or negligence. Despite astonishing advances in medical sciences, there are still many unknowns in medicine, and many conditions exhibit very similar symptoms.

People experiencing panic attacks and heart attacks exhibit disturbingly similar symptoms. Both can experience chest pain, shortness of breath, sweating, nausea and even heart palpitations.

The reason doctors are likely to request an ECG and blood tests for a patient exhibiting those symptoms is to protect themselves from medical malpractice claims. Even if the doctor suspects a patient is having a panic attack, it’s not worth the risk of making incorrect assumptions and potentially injuring or killing the patient through a lack of treatment.

Another example might be MS and a B12 deficiency. Both can potentially lead to fatigue, weight gain, mood swings and difficulty concentrating. This is also why doctors typically perform blood tests and MRIs for those symptoms, even if they suspect a patient just has a B12 deficiency.

Failure to diagnose malpractice can be difficult to win because of the uncertainties inherent in diagnostic medicine. That being said, doctors have a duty to rule out more serious conditions even if they suspect a patient is suffering from a minor condition that doesn’t require invasive, expensive or time-consuming treatments.

Dismissing a patient as overreacting or being a hypochondriac does not absolve the doctor of negligent behavior – and it’s important patients or their families aggressively pursue justice for that type of malpractice.

How to Prove Failure to Diagnose Medical Malpractice Occurred

Four legal criteria must be met for any successful medical malpractice claim – including failure to diagnose cases. You need to be able to clearly establish that:

• You had a doctor-patient relationship with the medical provider and were owed a duty of care
• The healthcare provider’s failure to diagnose constituted a breach of that duty of care
• The failure to diagnose was the direct cause of your illness, injury or worsening condition
• You suffered quantifiable harm as a result (financial, physical and/or emotional)

You and your legal team need to be able to establish all four of these criteria to succeed in your claim, and some of the facts can be more difficult to prove than others.

The most significant hurdle is usually the second criterion – proving that the health provider’s failure to diagnose constituted a breach of their duty to the patient. In order to do so, it’s necessary to work with another medical expert in the same specialty as the defendant. They can testify to what a properly trained doctor who was meeting their duty of care would have done in the same situation. This step is a requirement for bringing medical malpractice suits in Texas and is one of the factors that make these cases so resource-intensive to pursue.

Find Out if You Have a Failure to Diagnose Medical Malpractice Case

Just because a case is hard doesn’t mean it’s not worth pursuing. The team at the Weycer Law Firm will fight for the ideal outcome in your medical malpractice case. Don’t hesitate to call us at (713) 668-4545 for a free case evaluation.