subject: Man Settles With Doctors For 2,500,000 After Being Diagnosed With Advanced Prostate Cancer [print this page] Once multiple doctors become involved in the care a patient it may be very important for the physicians to relay urgent diagnostic results as well as follow-up and treatment suggestions to the patient and to the other physicians. When the patient is informed of each doctors conclusions and the rationale behind those conclusions the the patient can reach an informed decision based on his or her level of risk tolerance. It gets more complex, however, when the one physician who is on the right track ends up not communicating his or her suspicions and the other physicians are not catching the signs and not ordering the right tests.
One such situation arose in the following reported case. A number of doctors had a chance to diagnose the man's prostate cancer when it was still in its early stages. The man first consulted with his primary care physician (PCP), a general practitioner, with complaints of urinary problems when he was 56 years old. The general practitioner concluded that the problems were not due to cancer even though no testing was done to rule out cancer.
Ten months later the individual consulted with a urologist who performed a digital examination on the prostate gland and took a PSA blood test. The patient then found out that this urologist did not practice in the patient's insurance network and so the patient consulted with a different urologist. The PSA test ordered by the first urologist came back and that urologist recommended a biopsy. Unfortunately, that recommendation evidently was not related to the family doctor or the urologist approved by the insurance company. The approved urologist did not order a PSA blood test. The approved urologist also did a physical examination of the prostate but did not find any abnormalities and concluded that the patient did not have cancer.
As a result the cancer was not detected for 2 years by which point it had spread beyond the prostate. By that point, the cancer had spread outside the prostate and had metastasized. Had the cancer been detected when the patient first complained of urinary problems, when he saw the first urologist, or even when he saw the second urologist, it would not have yet spread and, with treatment, the patient could have had roughly 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 represented the patient reported that the resulting medical malpractice claim settled for $2.5 Million.
As the claim discussed above illustrates, having multiple doctors for the same issue may end up in mistakes. The first mistake was not following the screening guidelines. This was an error committed by both the PCP and the second urologist. Additionally there was the failure of communication among the several doctors.
If the patient had been able to keep seeing the unapproved urologist the patient would have known that cancer was a possibility and that a follow up biopsy was recommended. If 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.
by: Joseph Hernandez
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