Physician Liability For Malpractice For Assuming Blood Due To Hemorrhoids Rather Than Colon Cancer

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Being told one has colon cancer tends to raise worry in most of people. It can hence feel highly reassuring for your physician say that you only have hemorrhoids and there is no need to be anxious 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 possibly serious gastrointestinal problems). Otherwise, you might not learn that you have colon cancer until it is too late.

Should a doctor decide without testing assumes that claims of blood in the stool or rectal bleeding by a patient are the result of hemorrhoids and it subsequently is discovered that the patient had colon cancer all along, that doctor might not have met the standard of care. Under those circimstances, the patient may have a legal claim against that doctor.

Over 10 million people have hemorrhoids and another million new incidents of hemorrhoids will probably occur this year as opposed to a little more than the 100 thousand new incidents of colon cancer that will be detected . In addition, colon cancers do not always. When they do, the bleeding could be non-consistent. And based on where the cancer is in the colon, the blood may not even be apparent in the stool.

Maybe it is simply as a result of the difference in the volume of instances being identified that a number of physicians simply assume that the presence of blood in the stool or rectal bleeding is from hemorrhoids. This is playing the odds. A doctor making this diagnosis will be right greater than ninety percent of the time. It seems reasonable, doesnt it? The problem, though, is that if the doctor is wrong in this diagnosis, the patient might not discover he or she has colon cancer until it has developed to an advanced stage, maybe to the point where treatment is no longer effective.

For this reason doctors commonly recommend that a colonoscopy ought to be ordered immediately if someone complains of blood in the stool or rectal bleeding. A colonoscopy is a method whereby a flexible scope with a camera on the end is used to visualize the inside of the colon. If growths (polyps or tumors) are discovered, they can be removed (if sufficiently small) or sampled and checked for the presence of cancer (by biopsy). Colon cancer may effectively be eliminated as the reason for the blood providing that a colonoscopy finds no cancer

By diagnosing complaints of blood in the stool or rectal bleeding as caused by hemorrhoids while not performing the correct tests to eliminate the possibility of colon cancer, a doctor puts the patient at risk of not finding out that the patient colon cancer before it reaches an advanced, possibly untreatable, stage. This might constitute a departure from the accepted standard of medical care and might lead to a malpractice claim.

About the Author:
Joseph Hernandez is an Attorney accepting complex injury cases, including Medical Malpractice cases. You can learn more about cases involving advanced colon cancer and stage 4 colon cancer



Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com


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