In October 2011, Amanda Velasquez, a pregnant 20-year-old, walked to Woodhull Medical Centre to see her obstetrician. She was experiencing blurred vision and worried that she was losing her eyesight. Her obstetrician assured her that she had nothing to worry about, and she went home.
Unfortunately, Amanda’s symptoms of cloudy vision and pressure around her eyes didn’t go away, and she visited the hospital six more times with the same complaint, but her obstetrician chose to fixate on her pregnancy rather than check her eyes and told her that there was no problem at each visit.
Amanda gave birth two months later, only to find that she couldn’t see her baby boy properly due to her blurred vision. She went to the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary several weeks later and was diagnosed with glaucoma, a condition that damages the optic nerve due to abnormally high pressure around the eye. By the time Amanda was diagnosed and had surgery a month later, she was 90% blind.
After filing a medical malpractice lawsuit for her obstetrician’s failure to diagnose, Amanda went to trial and was awarded $15 million in damages for her life-altering injury.
Legal Matters
Failure to diagnose is a kind of diagnostic error caused by your doctor being negligent when treating you. If your doctor doesn’t take the necessary steps to determine what illness you have, then you are at risk of becoming injured or even disabled.
While a failure to diagnose should never happen, there are many reasons why they do. Some of the most common causes of failure to diagnose include:
- Limited availability of diagnostic tests, specialists, or informatics resources
- Poor training of healthcare providers
- Not scheduling follow-up appointments
- Poor communication and coordination
- Unaffordable care
- Negligence from doctors, nurses, or the facility
- Medical errors such as anesthesia errors, birth injuries, surgical errors, and other doctor errors
What’s sad about Amanda’s case is that she had access to the required tests and specialists to diagnose her glaucoma, but her doctor was ultimately negligent and failed to diagnose her.
When Amanda filed her medical malpractice lawsuit, the obstetrician and hospital denied any wrongdoing. This is common in medical malpractice lawsuits, and doctors and hospitals generally have a list of reasons why they aren’t at fault, some of which include:
- The medical condition that you had when you consulted with them was likely to cause you harm even if it had been promptly diagnosed and treated
- You may have approached the wrong specialist and thought the doctor capable of operating outside of their specialty
- You may have withheld important information or given misleading information to your doctor which may have aided or hindered their ability to diagnose the problem correctly
- If your doctor’s mistake was one that any reasonable doctor would have made, then they are not considered to have acted negligently
As this list shows, you need to consult with an NYC medical malpractice lawyer if you live in NYC and have been a victim of medical malpractice.
The law doesn’t hold doctors as legally responsible for all diagnostic errors, so you will have the best possible chance of winning your lawsuit and receiving compensation if you contact an NYC medical malpractice attorney. These NYC attorneys are specialists when it comes to medical malpractice law and the statute of limitations that pertain to NYC.
Contact
If you have been injured or disabled due to a doctor’s failure to diagnose you, then you can contact the medical malpractice lawyers of Rosenburg, Minc, Falkoff & Wolff LLP in NYC.
By calling 212-344-1000, you can speak to one of our medical malpractice attorneys for a free, confidential consultation.
