Lung cancer is a serious disease that requires urgent treatment. Unfortunately, not all patients with this condition are able to obtain the medical care they need quickly. They might go to the doctor with symptoms that can occur with other conditions. Some of the most common symptoms of lung cancer, which include shortness of breath and coughing, are also associated with many other conditions. This might lead the doctors caring for you to misdiagnose this condition.
Around 150,000 people die in the United States of lung cancer each year. There are 200,000 people diagnosed with this often terminal condition each year. Each one of these individuals is counting on the medical team caring for them to do what they need to do to beat the disease so they can be deemed survivors instead of sufferers.
Some people falsely believe that if they never smoked a cigarette that they won’t suffer from lung cancer. This simply isn’t the case. Around 7,300 of the people who die of lung cancer each year haven’t ever smoked.
Medical professionals should always be on the lookout for lung cancer when a patient comes in with symptoms that can signal the disease. Lung cancer is the second most common form of cancer in this country for men and women. It is also the leading cause of death from cancer.
When patients aren’t diagnosed properly and promptly, the lung cancer can spread. This could mean that a treatable cancer is left alone until it becomes untreatable. No patient deserves that. The patients who aren’t properly diagnosed might choose to seek compensation for the damage the missed diagnosis caused.
Source: United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Lung Cancer Awareness,” accessed Nov. 17, 2017
