Boston Medical Malpractice and Workers' Compensation Blog

Cancer is definitely a life-threatening diagnosis, and when doctors fail to diagnose it in time, patients can die. But sometimes patients are put at risk not because of any negligence from their health care providers but due to denials of care from their health insurance carriers.

Such was the case for one 30-year-old married woman from Charlestown. Her doctor initially prescribed chemotherapy and radiation to shrink the tumors found in her cervix. However, her cancer was very aggressive and soon spread elsewhere in her body.

Imagine going to the doctor for a seemingly minor problem of blood in the urine. Your doctor orders a CT scan and reports that there is a large mass in the kidney and that the organ must be removed.

Yet, after the surgery to remove the kidney, your surgeon notifies you that there was no tumor at all, and an error led to the removal of your healthy kidney.

You trust your doctor to make the best possible decisions regarding your health care. Like other patients in Massachusetts, you have to rely on medical professionals to take you seriously, order the right tests and render the correct diagnoses. Unfortunately, doctors misdiagnose patients more often than you might think. If a doctor recently treated you but you are not getting better, he or she could have rendered a misdiagnosis.

Both misdiagnoses and missed diagnoses can cause serious harm to patients. Experts believe that these errors in decision occur in as many as 40% of all diagnoses in the United States. This means that the possibility of a doctor incorrectly diagnosing you or a loved one is relatively high.

Choosing in vitro fertilization to begin or enlarge a family can be a difficult path to parenthood, one that may be fraught with disappointment. But one North Attleboro woman was shocked at the discovery that a Providence, Rhode Island, fertility clinic retained a cryopreserved "morula," or embryo in its early stages, from her in vitro fertility efforts back in 2004.

The woman and her late husband were parents of one son when they turned to the fertility specialists at Women & Infants Hospital. It took three treatment cycles to produce four embryos, none of which were viable, according to the woman's doctor. They were never implanted, and the couple ceased their efforts soon after.