Failure to Treat

There are many reasons why a doctor may fail to treat a medical condition. But, perhaps the most common reason is also the simplest: you simply can’t or won’t treat a condition if you don’t know it exists.

Failure to diagnose an illness or a misdiagnosis can result in delayed treatment, treatment for a condition the patient doesn’t actually have, or no treatment whatsoever. Doctors may rush through their examination of a patient in order to move on to their next appointment. They may fail to acknowledge or respond to a patient’s complaints and symptoms or draw conclusions about the patient’s condition based on overconfidence in their own abilities rather than on objective test results. They may not conduct proper screening or evaluation of a patient’s medical records or family history. All of these mistakes can result in a physician missing clear indicators of illness or disease, and all of these errors can, in turn, lead to the failure to treat a serious medical condition that will only get worse without medical intervention.

Even if doctors do conduct the proper screening, evaluation, and testing, they may fail to properly interpret the results of those tests. They may fail to order additional testing that should have been conducted based on indicators in the earlier tests. Mistakes can be made in the handling of blood and other samples that can call into question the accuracy of test results. Any one of these errors can cause a doctor to misdiagnose a condition, which can lead to further damage. The physician may start a course of treatment for the patient, but it could be for a condition the patient does not have. Sometimes, the wrong course of treatment can cause a patient to be prescribed harmful medication or undergo unnecessary surgery.