St. Petersburg Medical Misdiagnosis Lawyer

Misdiagnosis means a reasonable medical professional would not have diagnosed an individual patient with a particular condition based on their individual symptomatology, family history, or social history. It basically means that a physician’s mistake is presuming that a condition is not dangerous or diagnosing a patient with one type of medical condition when it is something else that either testing or the medical records would not have led a different similarly situated physician to make that determination.

The common forms of misdiagnosis are failure of a medical provider to have all the medical history, social history, or medical records available for a particular patient or failure to identify something that exists. If you were misdiagnosed by your health care provider in St. Petersburg, contact a medical misdiagnosis lawyer in the area today.

First Steps

When you think you might have had a misdiagnosis, ask yourself these questions: what is the actual diagnosis now that it has been identified and how has the delay in the diagnosis, the treatment that an individual patient underwent, or the misdiagnosed condition affected you? For example, were you subject to surgery or did they had organs removed? Next, take your case to an attorney.

The first thing a medical misdiagnosis attorney in St. Petersburg can look into is whether the records available to the physician. If they were, did the physician collect them. Based on a review of the medical records, family history, and social history of the patient, would the doctor have come to a differential diagnosis? Based on that, the attorney can consider whether there was a reason to believe that decision was a reasonable diagnosis or wrong.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

The most common mistake made is that people fail to ask for a second opinion when a doctor diagnoses them and tells them they are going to have some radical procedures.

The mistakes can be avoided by being conscious of a person’s medical condition, being consistent in a person’s care, and making sure the medical providers that are treating the person have all the pertinent available information available to them or that they know that they should be looking for something.

A person has to be very proactive about their medical care. Also, a person needs to consider medical opinions, especially ones that are going to require serious intervention and request a second or supplemental opinion to be sure that medical professionals are seeing something the same way before major intervention is undertaken.

Case Process

Misdiagnosis cases are unique because people have to not only prove the harm that their actual condition caused, but prove the damage that was done by the misdiagnosis. Additionally, the plaintiff must prove how that misdiagnosis affected the documentation, diagnosis, and treatment of the actual condition the individual had. It compounds the process, as such, it is important to have a St. Petersburg medical misdiagnosis lawyer to wade through this process for you.

It is important to understand that these cases are very complex and that there is a significant amount of review by medical experts necessary to even substantiate the misdiagnosis. A lot of people do not recognize that a diagnosis that winds up not being the correct diagnosis is not necessarily a misdiagnosis. For example, a lot of people are told by their doctors they may have cancer, but further testing is done to determine that they do not have cancer.  That is not misdiagnosis; that is simply a differential diagnosis.

When Speaking With An Attorney

If you are considering a misdiagnosis suit, it is important to be aware that you are going to need to identify the appropriate physician diagnosis, chart, tests, and whatever they had that leads to that condition. Then you will have to tell your medical misdiagnosis attorney in St. Petersburg why they believe they have been misdiagnosed. That is not a matter simply of their opinion. The plaintiff is going to have to be able to provide the names of the medical professionals that have said they do not believe the conditions is what they originally have been diagnosed with.