Medical Malpractice Lawyers

Is Overdiagnosis Reason Enough to Call a Cancer Misdiagnosis Attorney in Cleveland?

A new study links mammograms to overdiagnosis of cancer. In the experience of our Cleveland cancer misdiagnosis attorney, overdiagnosis can in some ways be just as dangerous as misdiagnosis.The study linked routine mammogram screening to over-diagnosis of non-aggressive tumors, identifying tumors unlikely to be fatal without curbing the diagnosis of advanced cancer stages.

Better safe than sorry, right? Actually, no.

“Overdiagnosis means that healthy women get unnecessary breast cancer diagnoses,” Dr. Karsten Juhl Jorgensen, lead scientist in the study, told Fox News. “A breast cancer diagnosis is a life-changing event for the woman and her family, with substantial implications for their quality of life. It also leads to overtreatment with surgery, radiotherapy and sometimes chemotherapy – we know these treatments have serious, sometimes lethal, consequences.”

No Link for Advanced Cases

The study compared screening results over a single time period of two regions of Denmark. One offered biennial mammography for women aged 50 to 69, and one that didn’t. The study examined data on more than 1.4 million Danish women aged 35 to 84 from 1980 to 2010. Screening wasn’t linked to a lower incidence of advanced cancer cases.

So should women just forgo mammogram screening? Not exactly. The researchers suggested that would depend on age and family history. At best, however, results would be better taken with a grain of salt.

If you feel you may have been overdiagnosed, you might consider talking to one of our cancer misdiagnosis attorneys in Cleveland. We offer free consultations..

Cleveland Cancer Misdiagnosis Lawyer: 1 in 71 Cases Misdiagnosed

Most people are surprised by the statistics. But for a Cleveland cancer misdiagnosis lawyer, the stats, while alarming, prove why litigation is necessary in holding medical professionals accountable for their diagnostic mistakes. In the right direction, a cancer misdiagnosis might be a relief from a living nightmare. In the wrong direction, a misdiagnosis could very well prove to be a death sentence.

Researchers at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore found that one out of every 71 cases was misdiagnosed, based on the tissue samples they studied from 6,000 people across the country. Moreover, up to one in five cases was misclassified.

“That can change whether a patient gets no treatment, vs. surgery, vs. radiation,” Dr. Jonathan Epstein of The Johns Hopkins Hospital told ABC News.  “If they get surgery or radiation, which type?”

Part of the problem is that despite medical technology advances, the diagnosis pretty much comes down to a judgment call.

“We really still make the diagnosis pretty much the way we did for the last 50 years,” Dr. Leonard Zwelling of the MD Anderson Cancer Center told ABC News. “It has to come down to looking at a piece of the tumor on a slide by a pathologist.”

Bottom line, be certain to always secure a second opinion. And if you have been the victim of a misdiagnosis, consult a Cleveland cancer misdiagnosis lawyer. Medical accountability matters. People’s very lives depend on it.

An Inspiring Story of Survival from the Files of a Cancer Misdiagnosis Attorney in Cleveland

Here’s an inspiring story from the news clips of a cancer misdiagnosis attorney in Cleveland:

A Columbus local woman who suffered from acute myeloid leukemia, a rare and aggressive blood cancer, was misdiagnosed and told she had Crohn’s disease.

At 23, Leeanne Hester suffered from chronic fatigue, stomach nausea and unexplained weight loss. Since her blood counts weren’t recovering, she knew it couldn’t be Crohn’s. Close to finishing her Master’s degree in Public Health at George Washington University , she credits her own education for giving her the skills to pursue her own advocacy.

“I cannot emphasize how important it is to advocate for yourself in our healthcare system,” she told CNN. “I didn’t shy away from asking questions and pushing for answers, because I knew something wasn’t right with my body. I even had to call and remind one of my specialists that I needed to schedule a follow up appointment. Had I waited even a month or two, it may have been too late.”

A bone marrow biopsy revealed the cancer. She faced the prospect of five years of survival, at best, unless she had a bone marrow transplant.

Fortunately, a donor was found – a 22-year-old man in Israel named Evgeny Galinsky. Hester survived and recovered, and even invited Galinsky to her wedding, where the two finally met face to face.

Today she’s happily married. Her full recovery is a great inspiration to the clients of a cancer misdiagnosis attorney in Cleveland.

From the Desk of a Cancer Misdiagnosis Attorney in Cleveland: When Cancer is Misdiagnosed by an Entire Medical Community

Sometimes an entire type of tumor can be misdiagnosed by the medical community for decades. In this case of cancer misdiagnosis, an attorney in Cleveland turned out not to be necessary. In fact, it’s good news for nearly 10,000 of the 65,000 thyroid cancer patients that are diagnosed with the disease in the US every year.

The New York Times recently reported that a panel of doctors decided that a type of thyroid cancer historically classified as cancer is not actually cancer at all. They have downgraded the condition, sparing thousands of patients the removal of their thyroid, radioactive treatments and regular checkups for the rest of their lives. It turns out the identified tumor is not actually a threat.

“The reclassified tumor is a small lump in the thyroid that is completely surrounded by a capsule of fibrous tissue,” the New York Times explained. “It’s nucleus looks like a cancer but the cells have not broken out of their capsule, and surgery to remove the entire thyroid followed by treatment with radioactive iodine is unnecessary and harmful, the panel said. They have now renamed the tumor. Instead of calling it ‘encapsulated follicular variant of papillary thyroid carcinoma,’ they now call it ‘noninvasive follicular thyroid neoplasm with papillary-like nuclear features,’ or NIFTP. The word ‘carcinoma’ is gone.”

Is it a case for a cancer misdiagnosis attorney in Cleveland? Probably not, but it certainly is a relief to the patients and families who can rest assured knowing this particular tumor is not actually cancer at all.

Why Doctors Should Listen to the Patients and Clients of a Cancer Misdiagnosis Lawyer in Cleveland

What can doctors do to prevent cancer misdiagnosis? As any cancer misdiagnosis lawyer in Cleveland will tell you, the answer is simple: listen. Pay attention to the patient and actually hear what they are trying to say. They may not have a fancy medical degree, but they know what hurts.

That’s the advice of a new report published this past fall by the Institute of Medicine. “Patients are central to the solution,” Dr. John Ball of the American College of Physicians told the AP.

Further, doctors sought for second and third opinions should listen to each other and communicate when errors occurred.

“We don’t expect the doctor to have all the answers in their brain. Nobody could or should,” Dr. Christine Cassel, president of the National Quality Forum, said in the report.

And ego should be checked at the door in the interest of the patient.

“This is not about blame. It’s about understanding how errors arise and what we can do to prevent them,” said Dr. Mark Graber of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine, which prompted the IOM study.

If you believe your cancer has been misdiagnosed, consider your legal options. Contact a Linton Law Firm cancer misdiagnosis lawyer in Cleveland today for a free consultation.

A Case That a Cancer Misdiagnosis Attorney in Cleveland Rarely Encounters: Intentional Misdiagnosis

As any cancer diagnosis attorney in Cleveland will tell you, misdiagnosing cancer is not always a case of negligence. In some cases, it is a punishable crime that deserves jail time, not to mention financial restitution to the victims involved. A doctor in Michigan recently received a 45 year prison sentence for intentionally misdiagnosing cancer in hundreds of healthy patients purely to bill them for his services and line his own pockets.

Prosecutors originally sought a 175 year prison sentence for Dr. Farid Fata, according to the Wall St. Journal. Fata pleaded guilty to Medicare fraud last year. Authorities suspect more than 500 people suffered through the intentional misdiagnoses. More than 150 alleged victims filed impact statements in court.

“I’m here because I don’t want this to happen to anyone else,” Marietta Crabtree testified in court. Her husband, Donald Crabtree, died of kidney cancer at the age of 79 after receiving what his family claims was improper chemotherapy treatment to treat a case of lung cancer that actually did not exist. “We trusted him and we never thought that we couldn’t.”

The cancer misdiagnosis was blatant and intentional.

“Fata single handedly designed the fraud, which necessitated fooling his own employees and professional staff,” federal prosecutors contended in a court memorandum.

Most cases a cancer misdiagnosis attorney in Cleveland comes across are the result of negligence. Rarely are they an intentional act. Nonetheless, any case of misdiagnosis can be deadly, either in delaying treatment or resulting in patients receiving chemotherapy for cancer they do not actually have, ironically resulting in giving them a deadly cancer.

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.

From the Desk of a Cleveland Cancer Misdiagnosis Lawyer: The Cost of False Positives in Breast Cancer

You don’t need to be a cancer misdiagnosis lawyer in Cleveland to understand that getting cancer wrong can be expensive. A recent study manages to put a price tag on breast cancer: $4 billion a year, for false positive mammograms and the over diagnosis of breast cancer in women ages 40 to 59.

The study was published last April in the journal Health Affairs.

According to the report, about 11 percent of the women surveyed had a false positive result, which means about 3.2 million women in the nation received a false positive that cost $2.8 billion in health care spending.

“Ultimately, the decision to undergo breast cancer screening must be based on careful consideration of the trade-offs between the benefits and the harms of screening,” the report’s authors wrote. “We need a balanced message that continues to encourage women to seek medical care when they detect a breast lump, but we should also caution them about the negative consequences of over-detection from mammography.”

Of course, that only reflects the cost of false positives. False negatives, on the other hand, carry an untold cost, including potentially that of a life. If you believe you have been the victim of a false diagnosis, contact a Linton Law Firm cancer misdiagnosis lawyer in Cleveland for a free consultation today.

Even Suzanne Somers May Have a Case for a Cancer Misdiagnosis Attorney in Cleveland

Suzanne Somers, the former Three’s Company Star, recently received some harrowing news. Her breast cancer had come back, and was supposedly rampant throughout her body. Luckily for Somers, the news proved to be yet another instance of cancer misdiagnosis, the kind of case a cancer misdiagnosis attorney in Cleveland comes across all the time. Her health problems were actually related to black mold exposure due to mold growing in the basement of a house she and her husband Alan Hamel were renting. The black mold could have proved just as fatal if Somers had not gotten treatment.

“I ended up in the hospital for six days with a misdiagnosis of cancer,” Somers, 68, told ET. “When they read the CAT scan they said, ‘You have cancer everywhere. You have a mass on your lung and it’s covering your whole liver, and you have so many masses in your chest we can’t count them, and they’re all tumors, and you have a blood clot, and you have pneumonia.”

It was shocking news for a woman who led such a healthy lifestyle- an all organic food diet, plenty of exercise and hormone therapy. But it was actually her basement that was the source of her health problems.

“When we went down to that room it was like Little Shop of Horrors,” Somers told ET. “This leased house that we were living in — there was an unfinished room downstairs where there was standing water and black mold. It was crawling up through the dry wall, like worms almost, into the air conditioning and heating ducts, and we were breathing it in for the four years. I got the fungus in my lung which can kill you.”

A cancer diagnosis error, whether it contributes to a fatal cancer case or not, causes unnecessary trauma in its wake. If you believe you have been a victim, contact a Linton Law Firm cancer misdiagnosis attorney in Cleveland for a free consultation today.

From the Desk of a Cancer Misdiagnosis Attorney in Cleveland: Mililani Man Awarded $5.6 Million for Missed MRI

A Mililani man was recently awarded $5.6 million for a cancer misdiagnosis that caused him to require mouth reconstruction.

Jeff Kim is lucky to be alive, but the tragedy is his recovery could have been much simpler if the right tests had been done and his cancer had been detected earlier. What could have required only one day in the hospital ended up requiring major reconstructive facial surgery. The misdiagnosis, which resulted from a series of missed tests, postponed his treatment for more than two years. Doctors ended up taking a bone from his leg to fix to his jaw, removing chest muscle to fix to his cheek and removing a tumor from behind his eye. He can’t chew food normally and saliva leaks out of the side of his cheek. He’s lucky to be alive, but his life will never be the same.

It’s a story that a cancer misdiagnosis attorney in Cleveland knows all too well. What could have been simple becomes an exceedingly complicated and grisly procedure.

“You’re looking back and you’re going we could have caught this at the early stages and it would have been a one day in the hospital surgery and five weeks radiation and I would have been back to work,” Kim told Hawaii News Now.

When he first visited Straub Clinic & Hospital about his condition, they told him he did not have cancer.

“Basically, they did some tests, but they did the wrong tests and it’s quite clear had they done the right tests, he would have been diagnosed two years earlier,” Kim’s attorney Richard Fried told ABC.

When the symptoms persisted, Kim visited a private oral surgeon who ordered the critical MRI that Straub had neglected. It pinpointed the cancer in time to save his life, but only after major damage had already been done.

If you’ve been the victim of cancer misdiagnosis, contact a cancer misdiagnosis attorney in Cleveland. Medical professionals need to be held accountable. People’s lives are at risk.