How Delayed Diagnosis Of Colon Cancer May Result In Medical Malpractice Case
Just the thought that one might have colon cancer tends to bring up worry in the majority of people. It can therefore feel quite reassuring to have your doctor say that you merely have hemorrhoids and there is no need to worry about the blood in your stool. Yet this reassurance ought to only come after the doctor has eliminated the possibility of colon cancer (and other potentially serious gastrointestinal problems). Else, you may not discover that you have colon cancer until it is too late. If a doctor automatically considers that claims of blood in the stool or rectal bleeding by a patient are due to hemorrhoids and it later is discovered that the patient had colon cancer all along, that physician may have committed medical malpractice. Under those circimstances, the patient may be able to pursue a lawsuit against that physician.
It is estimated that there are more than 10 million men and women with hemorrhoids and another million new cases of hemorrhoids will probably arise this year as opposed to a little more than the 100 thousand new instances of colon cancer that will be diagnosed. In addition, colon cancers do not always. When they do, the bleeding could be intermittent. And subject to the location of the cancer in the colon, the blood may not even be seen in the stool. Possibly it is simply as a result of the difference in the quantity of instances being detected that a number of doctors just suppose that the presence of blood in the stool or rectal bleeding is from hemorrhoids. This amounts to playing the odds. A physician who reaches this conclusion will be right more than 90% of the time. It appears realistic, doesn