Whenever several physicians become involved in the treatment of a patient it might be vital for them to communicate important diagnostic results as well as follow-up and treatment advice to the patient and other doctors. Patients generally expect that the doctor will contact them in the event that there are any serious results from testing ordered by the physician. Generally, when people do not receive a follow up communication from a doctor many view that as an indication that everthing is fine and that there is no need for them to follow up with the doctor. It becomes more complex, however, when the one doctor who is on the right track does not communicate his or her suspicions and the other physicians are not catching the signs and not ordering the proper tests. One such situation arose in the following reported case. A number of physicians had an opportunity to detect the man's prostate cancer when it was still in its early stages. A male patient went to his family doctor complaining of urinary problems. He was fifty-six at the time. The family doctor concluded that the problems were not associated with cancer although no testing was done to rule out cancer. The man, on his own, saw a urologist 10 months later. The urologist conducted a physical examination of the prostate and ordered a PSA blood test. The man then found out that this urologist was not covered by the patient's insurance and so the patient consulted with a second urologist. Although the blood test results came in neither the results of the test nor the first urologist's suspicion of cancer and recommendation that a biopsy be conducted were passed on to the man's family doctor or to his second urologist. The second urologist concluded that there were no abnormalities present with the prostate and that there was no evidence of cancer. As such the cancer was not detected for 2 years at which time it had spread beyond the prostate. The physicians treating the patient's cancer concluded that he probably had only one to five years to live as a result of the cancer's spread. The law firm that helped the patient published that the resulting medical malpractice claim settled for $2,500,000. As the case discussed above reveals, having multiple physicians for the same issue might lead to multiple errors. The first error consisted of not following the screening guidelines. This was an error committed by both the family doctor as well as the second urologist. And there was the failure of communication among the different physicians. Although there is no way to know whether the general practitioner or the second urologist would have followed up on results of the PSA test from the first urologist or on that urologist's suspicion and recommendation they at a minimum would have had information and perspective they were missing.
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This article goes over the report of a case involving multiple doctors who examined a patient with urinary problems yet due to a combination of unordered tests and miscommunications the man's prostate cancer diagnosis was delayed until it had spread. This resulted in a medical malpractice claim hat settled for $2,500,000
Joseph Hernandez is an attorney accepting cancer malpractice cases. To learn about metastatic prostate cancer and other cancer matters including breastcancer visit the websites
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