Female patients trust that their doctors will understand the difference between a significant health issue and something that does not present any risk to their wellbeing. One area where is this especially true is with breast cancer. Women rely on doctors to run all proper tests to find any cancer that may exist as early as possible. The existence of a lump in a breast raises concern right away. This is where the physician can do the right thing or the wrong thing. Typically, doctors agree that the right thing is to do tests to discover if that lump is cancerous. The reason most doctors agree that this is the proper plan of action is due to the fact that it is not possible to make that determination after merely on a physical examination (even if coupled with other variables like the woman’s age and family history).
There are a number of statistical realities physicians know about. The majority of changes that appear in the breast are noncancerous. Females who are younger than 50 are far less likely to be diagnosed with cancer of the breast than those above that age. Because of these two statistics some doctors are likely to discount a lump as just a benign cyst in case it arises in a woman under the age of fifty. Basically the odds are that such a patient does not have breast cancer.
Unfortunately, there is more to the matter. If breast cancer is found before it can reach a late stage (for example, stage 0, stage I or stage II), the woman has a high five-year survival rate But if the breast cancer is not found until it reaches stage III, the 5-year survival rate decreases and with regard to stage IV, the five-year survival rate is below 25%. About 12% of females will have breast cancer in their life time. This year alone, around 190,000 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer. Tragically, more than 39,000 women will pass away because of breast cancer. How many of these women might beat their breast cancer if their physicians had looked into the finding of a mass in the breast or an abnormal finding on a clinical breast exam and had discovered the breast cancer earlier, prior to spread or metastasis?
By doing a clinical breast examination a doctor just is not able to correctly distinguish between a benign cyst and a cancerous growth. Because of this, a physician ought to generally advocate that diagnostic testing be ordered without delay if a lump is discovered in a woman’s breast. Examples of diagnostic tests can include an imaging study such as a mammogram or an ultrasound, or a sampling, such as by biopsy or aspiration. Each test has the potential for a false negative so it may be necessary to do more than one test before cancer can be eliminated as the cause of the lump.
In cases where a doctor concludes that a mass in the breast of a female patient as only a benign cyst based only on a clinical breast examination, that physician places the patient in danger of not learning she has breast cancer until it metastasizes. Not performing proper diagnostic testing, including an imaging study such as a mammogram or ultrasound, or a sampling, such as a biopsy or aspiration, might amount to a departure from the accepted standard of medical care and may bring about a medical malpractice claim.
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