If your doctor misdiagnosed or failed to diagnose sarcoma, and you or someone you love suffered harm as a result, you could have grounds for a medical malpractice lawsuit.
Sarcoma, like carcinoma, grows in the tissues that run throughout the inside of your body. It is the rarer of the two, however, because it grows primarily in connective tissues — the tissues that support or connect other tissue in your body. Like most cancer, sarcoma is far more treatable when detected early. If your doctor misdiagnoses or fails to diagnose it, they put you at grave risk.
The Newsome | Melton legal team goes after medical providers who harm their clients by misdiagnosing or failing to diagnose sarcoma and other cancers. If you or someone you love was injured because of this type of misdiagnosis, a sarcoma misdiagnosis lawyer from our firm may be able to help you recover the compensation you deserve. We offer a free case evaluation to discuss your options.
Call us at 888-261-5614.
Symptoms and Risk Factors for Sarcoma
Physicians must know what to look for to correctly diagnose sarcoma. This requires understanding the symptoms and risk factors of the disease. Chances are you went to the doctor because you had certain symptoms. These symptoms were likely associated with sarcoma. If your doctor failed to make the connection, it could constitute negligence.
The same is true of risk factors. If you presented one or more to your doctor and it failed to set off alarm bells that further testing for sarcoma might be in order, then your doctor may not have upheld the duty they had to you as a patient.
Symptoms
The most common symptoms of sarcoma include the following:
- A skin lump becoming more painful as it grows and presses on nearby nerves
- Pain occurring within bone tissue (often worse at night)
- Swelling in an affected area
- Developing a limp from sarcoma growing in the leg
Some sarcomas can be difficult to spot in the beginning. Particularly hard to find are growths that occur in the connective tissue of the skin, as they often do not cause the myriad of symptoms produced by tumors of the bone.
That said, your doctor’s job is to be thorough with their evaluation. If we can show that you had any symptom at all associated with sarcoma and that your doctor knew about it but failed to make the correct diagnosis, we have the first building block of a successful malpractice case.
Risk Factors
Your doctor should have been aware of a heightened risk of sarcoma if you presented one or more of the following factors:
- Family history
- Paget’s disease (a bone disorder)
- Genetic disorders, including retinoblastoma, neurofibromatosis, Gardner syndrome, and Li-Fraumeni syndrome
- Radiation exposure (often during previous cancer treatments)
The presence of one or more risk factors does not automatically point to sarcoma. Nevertheless, it should heighten your doctor’s suspicion and compel them to order tests to either confirm or rule out the disease.
The Newsome | Melton Team Will Build a Compelling Medical Malpractice Case for Misdiagnosis of Sarcoma
A sarcoma misdiagnosis lawyer from Newsome | Melton can help you prove the elements that must be present in a medical malpractice case. They are as follows:
- Your doctor owed you a duty of care.
- Your doctor failed to uphold that duty.
- Because of your doctor’s failure, you or someone you love suffered harm.
- You incurred specific damages as a result.
Duty of Care
We must establish that your doctor had a duty of care to you at the time of the misdiagnosis. Fortunately, this is an easy thing to demonstrate, as every doctor has a duty of care to any of their active patients. We simply must show evidence that you had a doctor-patient relationship at the time of the misdiagnosis. We can do this by presenting billing statements or insurance paperwork.
Failure to Uphold Duty
We have to show that your doctor did not uphold their duty of care to you. The way to show this is by comparing your doctor’s actions to what would have been expected of a reasonable person faced with the same situation. Here, the “reasonable person” is another doctor with the same education and training. It does not refer to a specific person but rather a composite of a typical doctor.
Our lawyers use expert witnesses to review all of the evidence in your case. If our experts believe that your physician failed to make the proper diagnosis thereby breaching the standard of care, we can show a failure of duty.
Injury
After we have established that your doctor did not uphold their duty of care to you, we have to connect that failure to actual injuries that you suffered. In the case of a sarcoma misdiagnosis, your injuries typically involve the cancer continuing to grow after it should have been diagnosed and treated. Your medical records should make this very clear, and we will lean heavily on them in making our case.
Damages
Finally, we must connect your injuries to specific damages incurred by you. These can be economic damages, such as medical expenses or time away from work, or non-economic damages, such as pain and suffering, emotional anguish, and disfigurement.
At Newsome | Melton, our dedicated, compassionate attorneys focus on medical malpractice, and our job is to make sure victims recover the fair compensation they deserve for their injuries. If your doctor misdiagnosed sarcoma and you suffered because of it, we want to help. We offer a free case evaluation.