Florida Cancer Misdiagnosis Lawyers​

The misdiagnosis of cancer is medical malpractice. It can occur when the proper tests are not ordered or a tumor is labeled as benign when it is malignant.

An estimated 12 percent of all cancer diagnosis may be initially misdiagnosed, according to the authors of a published study in the journal Cancer. While the failure to diagnose or the wrong diagnosis is seldom intentional, that doesn’t change the devastating outcome.

Unfortunately, a cancer misdiagnosis happens every day and can include:

• Malignant cancer is improperly interpreted or misgraded
• Malignant cancer is misread in the lab
• A patient fails to receive the proper follow-up
• A patient at an increased risk of cancer does not receive adequate screening
• A lab or doctor can fail to notify the patient of the condition

For women, breast cancer is often misdiagnosed in younger women, even though young patients may experience a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer.

With about one in ten women experiencing breast cancer in her lifetime, most still turn to the mammogram as the gold standard for diagnosis. But mammography has a false-negative rate of about ten percent. The percentage can be even higher in women who have dense breast tissue.

The longer the cancer goes without diagnosis and treatment, the greater the chance that it will progress. An early diagnosis increases the chances of survival by at least five years. The longer treatment is delayed, higher doses of radiation and chemotherapy will be required as part of the treatment regimen. That is not only painful but debilitating and expensive.