When you seek medical care, you're placing your trust in a doctor, and your life in his or her hands. Nobody wants to receive bad news from a physician, but the only thing worse is not receiving a diagnosis in time to do something about it.
When you have a doctor-patient relationship with a physician, the doctor has a duty: to act with the same level of medical knowledge and skill that a reasonably competent doctor in the same practice area would have. If the doctor breaches that duty by failing to diagnose your illness under circumstances when a physician would reasonably have been expected to make the diagnosis, and you suffer harm as a result, the doctor has committed medical malpractice.
The term “failure to diagnose” typically refers to a medical professional failing to make any connection between a patient's symptoms or test results and a diagnosis of illness. Sometimes patients are told their illness is “all in their head.” Other times, a failure to diagnose is really a misdiagnosis, when a patient really has one ailment but is being treated for another. A failure to diagnose can also mean a delayed diagnosis, often with the illness getting worse between the time it should have been detected and the time a correct diagnosis was actually made.
Our medical malpractice team has dealt with many cases of failure to diagnose serious medical conditions, including:
Attorney Rhett Fraser understands how devastating it is for patients who placed their faith in medical care providers to discover that their trust was misplaced. Failure to diagnose a serious illness can lead to the need for more invasive procedures, more pain and longer recovery times, and often, death when the illness is diagnosed too late for successful treatment.
If you believe that you, or a loved one, has suffered injury from failure to diagnose a serious medical condition, your time to take action is limited. Connect with an experienced Portland medical malpractice attorney. We will take the time to evaluate whether your doctor's failure to diagnose your illness rose to the level of medical malpractice, and help you decide what to do next.
The Fraser Law Firm P.C. serves Portland and the surrounding area, working with clients throughout Oregon. Contact us at (971) 266-8877. We look forward to working with you.