Medical Malpractice Lawyers

Study: Nearly 1 in 20 US Adults May Need a Cleveland Cancer Misdiagnosis Lawyer in Their Lifetimes

It’s a startling figure that a cancer misdiagnosis lawyer in Cleveland knows all too well. Nearly 12 million people every year suffer a cancer misdiagnosis, at least 1 in every 20 US adults, according to a study published in the journal BMJ Quality and Safety.

About half of those errors had “the potential to lead to severe harm.”

“Diagnostic errors pose an important threat to health care quality and safety in outpatient settings,” Drs. Hardeep Singh of the Houston Veterans Affairs Center for Innovations in Quality and Eric J. Thomas of the University of Texas at Houston wrote in their paper.

“The question is, can we eliminate human error, and the answer is no,” Singh told the Boston Globe. “We have just now begun to understand what [these errors] are and what we can do.”

The rate cancer is misdiagnosed in outpatients has surprisingly not been looked at in many studies.

“The problem of diagnostic errors in general has not been front-and-center in the patient safety movement until recently. And the problem of outpatient safety and diagnostic safety in the outpatient setting has been even more overlooked and harder to get our hands around,” Gordon Schiff, associate director of the Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, told the Boston Globe. “This [new study] is a very good first pass at trying to really in a more rigorous way establish the incidence of diagnostic errors.”

The clients of a cancer misdiagnosis lawyer in Cleveland are not alone. It is surprisingly common. As the medical community becomes more aware of the problem, hopefully more will be done to decrease the rate so cancer can be discovered well within a treatable phase.