Articles Posted in Misdiagnosing Cancer

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Even those of us who know little about cancer know that the earlier your cancer is diagnosed the better your chances. So if this is common knowledge then we would expect that it would be almost a rule in the medical community: rule out cancer whenever possible in order to insure the best outcome possible. Yet all too often we hear stories about patients whose cancer was either misdiagnosed as something else or undiagnosed all together. When the misdiagnosis of cancer leads to a far worse outcome for the cancer patient there is often a case of medical malpractice.

Consider the case of a recent Illinois wrongful death settlement that was approved by a Cook County judge. The widow received $1.59 million from her deceased husband’s treating urologist and his physician group after he failed to diagnose her husband’s bladder cancer in a timely manner. The plaintiff-decedent’s undiagnosed cancer spread over a two-year period and was the ultimate cause of his death.

The facts of the Illinois wrongful death case are as follows. Over the span of two years the man presented to his urologist for CT scans of his abdomen and pelvis. The scans showed two enlarged lymph nodes, which can be a sign that cancer has metastasized to other areas of the body. However, the urologist took no action to investigate the enlarged lymph nodes for cancer.

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Last Friday, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston hosted a symposium for patients diagnosed with Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumor (GIST) and their families. The all-day event, “Living with GIST”, was not only informative for GIST patients, but was also a celebration. The event marked the ten-year anniversary of finding a successful treatment for GIST.

GIST is a rare type of cancer that affects the body’s digestive tract and its nearby abdominal structures. Unlike the majority of cancers, which are carcinomas, GIST tumors are sarcomas and do not respond to chemotherapy or radiation therapy. As Dr. George Demetri explained to the audience, prior to the development of effective treatments, GIST tumors were surgically removed until it was no longer clinically effective to do so. The development of molecular targeted therapy, such as Imatinib (Gleevec) and Sunitinib (Sutent), changed the prognosis for GIST patients, bringing hope where there had been none.

Dr. Demetri and his colleagues shared the joy of the early days of the Imatinib clinical trials, when they saw the previously untreatable cancer tumors shrinking and stabilizing after short trials of drug therapy. The enthusiasm of Dr. Demetri and his colleagues, combined with the stories of hard work and barriers overcome, spoke to the amazing accomplishments of these medical professionals.

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An Illinois medical malpractice case recently was settled, avoiding an Illinois jury trial regarding the death of an Illinois man with undiagnosed bladder cancer. The Illinois medical malpractice lawsuit revolved around the urologist who allegedly failed to diagnose the man’s bladder cancer in a timely manner.

The case calls to mind the importance of securing a timely diagnosis in Illinois cancer cases, where just a few months delay may result in drastic differences in the cancer’s staging and in the patient’s chance of a positive outcome.

In this particular case the man had first been referred to the urologist for a second opinion regarding continued complaints of urinary tract difficulties. The defendant doctor determined that the man’s symptoms were behavioral, meaning that they had more to do with the patient’s mental state than with his physical state. In light of this diagnosis, which was later found to be unfounded, the doctor decided that these symptoms did not present any risk to the patients lower or upper urinary tracts.

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