Our firm was featured last Friday on KING 5 news regarding a recent case concerning failure to properly diagnose breast cancer. The KING 5 story is linked here.

Almost every time, a breast cancer case is based upon a failure to diagnose.  Failure to diagnose, as a legal theory, comes with quite a few legal issues that make proper recovery more challenging.  Recently, Washington courts and practitioners were given guidance on one of these issues: the issue of how failure to diagnose claims interplay with informed consent claims. In December of 2012, the Washington Court of Appeals issued a case containing further guidance

While Breast Cancer Remains Prevalent, Early Detection Can Increase Long-Term Survival for Most Breast Cancers

In the United States, approximately 2.6 million women are currently living with breast cancer at any time, according to the US National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER). Statistically, women have a body 12% chance of developing breast cancer over the course of their lifetime, and historically 1 in every 36 die from breast cancer.

An interesting case was recently argued in the Supreme Court that concerns various aspects of our practice. The case is entitled Levin v. United States, and it is an appeal from the Ninth Circuit case 663 F.3d 1059 (2011). Of concern to our practice is how the courts will interpret certain aspects of the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), specifically with regard to suits against medical personnel employed by the U.S. government.

In the early 2000s, it came to the attention of the medical community that many hospitals were causing harm to patients while providing treatment. The number was somewhere around 25% of all hospital patients were actually hurt in some way by being treated for whatever ailment brought them to the hospital in the first place (1 in 4). Landrigan’s study set out to analyze a random set of hospitals in North Carolina, which was a state that had committed some of the most funds toward decreasing the number of harms caused by medical personnel. The results of this study show that even after a focused attempt to decrease the number from 25%, the number in fact remained the same, or merely decreased in a way that was statistically insignificant.

People are often perplexed at the verdict amounts in civil tort cases. Even sometimes to an experienced attorney, damages calculations, while rooted in clear guidelines, can have a counter-intuitive result. One such theory of damages that we want to try to explain in everyday terms is “loss of a chance,” and why sometimes damages may result to a person from what seems to be nothing at all. We will explain.