Diagnostic errors may constitute medical malpractice

Physicians have one of the tasks to instill greater consideration and respect in our society: caring for our health and wellbeing.

However, despite his deep knowledge of human anatomy and pathology, sometimes make mistakes, these can be extremely dangerous for their patients, who placed their trust in them and their hopes.

The most frequent of these, up to 40% of cases are diagnosed faults, precisely because they can occur in any medical discipline, from ophthalmology to obstetrics or pediatrics.

Many times these are derived from the fact that medicine is not an exact science, many diseases and pathologies presenting pictures of symptoms very similar. In addition, many aspects of our health are still unknown to doctors, especially in certain parts of our anatomy as the brain.

But other times, they are caused by carelessness on the part of the medical practitioner, not to conduct this analysis in sufficient depth on the patient, sometimes rushing to make a diagnosis that ultimately is not that corresponds to the true state of the patient.

In these cases when we can speak of medical malpractice for failure diagnosis.

The character flaws negligent diagnosis

In general we can say that diagnostic errors or failures could occur in two different ways:

- Attributing the medical practitioner to his patient a disease or illness other than the one that truly plagues.

- When the disease is diagnosed in a timely manner, thereby causing the progression of the same to a point where it could be very complicated or even impossible to treat.

In both events could result from severe damage and even irreparable damage to the patient. In the first hypothesis, it may happen that you give the patient medication that is contraindicated for true state, pudiéndole damage such as stomach ulcers or cardiovascular events (as we know, many drugs are contraindicated for people with heart disease).

In the second hypothesis, the failure detection and analysis of the symptoms may be terrible, since the success in treating many ailments and diseases, as with many varieties of cancer depends on early detection, can reach a point where the patient's condition was irreversible.

In those cases in which diagnostic errors caused by lack of diligence of the medical practitioner (not to perform mandatory tests to symptoms reported by the patient, or failure to properly interpret the signs, and these very obvious to the light of the facts) lead to considerable damage to the patient, when we talk about medical malpractice misdiagnosis.

When the patient suffers a case of negligence could bring a claim under the liability principle, whereby anyone who causes harm to another through fault or negligence, such damage should be repaired economically.

This, of course, you can not restore his health he never lost, but it will at least to mitigate the negative consequences of the negligent actions committed by the medical practitioner.



José Alberto Espina Andría

www.a-indemnizaciones.com