QUESTION
Missed to specify to do further followups for a radiology report mentioning about meningioma
Asked on Oct 07th, 2015 on Medical Malpractice - North Carolina
More details to this question:
Last year 2014 september, my mom had a fall in home and got hurt in head. We had to take her to an ER department and the doctor put sutures. Just to ensure no injury was caused to brain, he ordered a CT scan. The doctor reviewed the CT scan and said that everything looks normal and nothing to worry. The only follow up was to remove the sutures after 7-10 days. She went back to her home country (India) later last year and has been falling very frequently and had to get multiple sutures. Initially the doctors there thought she was weak and that might be the reason for the fall,. But after a recent fall, the doctor adviced to take a MRI and found a meningioma tumor. When we mentioned about the last year CT scan coming clean, he was worried that if it had developed over a year, then it might be a serious one. Just to ensure it was clean, we requested for entire medical report from last september. But CT scan report indicated a potential meningioma which the doctor did not tell us :(
1 ANSWER
There are several issues that must be evaluated when considering a potental medical malpractice claim. First, you must determine whether the doctor in question was negligent. Negligence is defined as a failure to comply with the applicable standard of care for similar doctors. Here, the question is not whether the potential meningioma can now be found on the 2014 CT in hindsight with the benefit of the MRI results. The question is whether the evidence of a potential meningioma was so obvious on the 2014 study that most similarly situated radiologists would have seen and reported the abnormality. If so, you must then determine whether the failure to report the abnormality caused some damage. In other words, how is your Mom's course or outcome different because of the negligence. If the abnormality should have been seen and reported, and if the failure to do so caused significant damages, then you may have a medical malpractice claim to pursue.
Answered on Oct 12th, 2015 at 12:54 PM