When a doctor fails to diagnose a medical condition, it cannot be treated. This statement is painfully obvious but very true. Healthcare professionals have a duty to apply a standard of care when diagnosing patients, and this includes listening to a patient’s complaints and symptoms, performing appropriate tests, reviewing a patient’s medical history, and ordering additional tests or referring to a specialist if needed. A single act of negligence or wrongdoing in the diagnosis of a patient may result in a failure to accurately identify the illness or injury – and it cannot then be treated.

Our NYC medical malpractice lawyers deal with cases involving failures to diagnose all types of medical conditions. This includes the negligent failure to diagnose or properly treat cancer, an early stage heart attack, or an aneurysm, or the negligent failure to diagnose or properly treat any disease or condition affecting the body’s organs and normal function that causes injury to the patient.

Key Elements to a Failure to Diagnose Lawsuit

There are three key elements that must be proven in a medical malpractice case involving a failure to diagnose or treat an illness or injury:

• A doctor-patient relationship existed at the time;
• The doctor’s conduct amounted to a failure to provide standard care; and
• The patient experienced harm as a result of this failure.

With a failure to diagnose, it will be necessary to prove that the doctor’s actions (or failure to act) constituted a failure to provide proper care, based on universally accepted standards at the time of the incident and the tools at hand. This is proven by showing that other reasonably competent doctors would have acted differently in the same or similar circumstances – perhaps that they would have been able to make an accurate diagnosis or would have recognized the need to send a patient to a specialist for further testing.

Because every case is different and these are highly technical matters, we recommend moving quickly to have a New York City medical malpractice attorney evaluate your case.