When you go to a doctor with new symptoms, you’re trusting that they’ll listen carefully, order the right tests, and put the pieces together in time. Most providers take that responsibility seriously. But when abnormal results are brushed aside or followup is never done, the consequences can be devastating. A delayed diagnosis can turn a treatable problem into a medical crisis or cost a patient the chance to survive at all. Time is critical when it comes to treatment in many cases.
Failure to diagnose and misdiagnosis cases often involve conditions like cancer, heart disease, stroke, blood clots, and serious infections. Sometimes the signs were there in black-and-white: abnormal lab results, imaging studies that weren’t properly read, or clear symptoms that were written off as “anxiety” or “nothing to worry about.” In other cases, different providers each did a small part of the work, but no one took responsibility for seeing the whole picture until it was too late. When that happens, families are left wondering how many opportunities to catch the problem were missed along the way.
Jeff Carey takes a careful look at what the medical team knew, when they should have known it, how they should have coordinated and shared information, and what would have been done at an earlier time. He compares the story told by the records to what a reasonably careful provider would have done under the same circumstances. That often means asking hard questions like were the right tests ordered, were abnormal results followed up on, did anyone pick up the phone when a critical value came back? We work with qualified medical experts to evaluate whether an earlier diagnosis would have changed your prognosis or kept the disease from reaching an advanced stage. In some cases, the focus is on the “lost chance of survival” that was taken from a patient by inattention or neglect.
Lung cancer cases are of particular interest to Mr. Carey because of his additional experience identifying environmental exposures like asbestos which causes lung cancer and the ability to prosecute asbestosis, mesothelioma, and lung cancer cases.
