Medical Malpractice: Delay in Diagnosing Breast Cancer

A 38 year old women presents to her primary care physician complaining of a small cyst like bump on her right breast. She has no family history of breast cancer and has a clean medical history. Her physician exams the lump and, while assuring the patient that is looks like nothing, refers her to a surgeon down the hall to perform a simple needle aspiration. The surgeon draws some fluid and tissue and informs the patient that it didn’t seem like it was anything to worry about. He then informed the patient that he would call her if she needed to return for a follow up.

The surgeon proceeded to send the tissue slides to a local pathologist who read the slides as suspicious of cancer and informed the surgeon to contact the patient. Neither the patient nor the family physician was notified of the pathology concern. Two and a half years later, the patient returns to find that she has stage IIIB iinvasive ductal carcinoma, and she has a less than fifty percent chance of survival.

1. She undergoes radiation, chemotherapy, and a radical mastectomy which finds multiple positive lymph nodes. Although cancer free, she is likely to suffer a recurrence in five years at which time the cancer will be metastatic and terminal. During litigation, the treating physician testified that the patient should have called him to get her results. The Lyon Firm represented this women and her family and obtained a favorable settlement before trial. Though currently cancer free, she lived with the fear and reality that recurrence could happen any day.

The key to beating cancer is catching it early. Despite this well recognized concept, every year breast cancer goes undiagnosed and progresses resulting in significant loss of life for the affected patient and the loss of a mother, sister, or friend. The delay in diagnosis can result from a number of mistakes by the health care provider. Often, it is the result of miscommunication as in the case described above. Other examples of medical negligence in this area include:

Radiology Errors ( i.e., the Radiologist misreads films that show early stages.)
Pathology Errors (i.e., the Pathologist misreads slides that show early stages.)
Primary Care Errors (i.e., the PCP fails to identify a suspicious lump, cyst, mole and refer the patient for biopsy or other medical specialist.
Surgical Errors (i.e., the surgeon fails to perform a biopsy.)

For more information, See the following links:

Mayo Clinic
National Cancer Institute
The University of Texas, MD Anderson
US Department of Health and Human Services, Women’s Health
Web MD