Long Island Misdiagnosis Lawyer

At Duffy & Duffy, you will find dedicated medical malpractice lawyers who have represented people hurt by the failure of a healthcare provider to properly diagnose an illness. We take these cases very seriously, focusing on understanding the details of your situation before we untangle the complex issues that often arise. Our Long Island misdiagnosis lawyers work aggressively to protect the legal rights of our clients, while also trying to ensure that medical professionals are held accountable for their careless actions.

Understanding Health Misdiagnoses

Misdiagnosis happens when a medical provider incorrectly diagnoses your illness or injury. Diagnostic errors can take the form of an incorrect diagnosis, a missed diagnosis, or a delayed diagnosis.

Your medical provider owes you a duty of care, and they could breach this duty in the following ways:

• Failing to recognize common ailments
• Failing to order appropriate testing
• Failing to interpret test results correctly
• Failing to refer for specialist consultations
• Failing to review your full medical history

Regardless of what led to your doctor's failure to properly diagnose your medical condition, our Long Island malpractice attorneys at Duffy & Duffy Law could help you fight for justice.

What Health Effects Can Be Caused by Medical Misdiagnosis?

An incorrect medical diagnosis can lead to severe consequences, including worsening of your existing condition or forcing you to undergo unnecessary treatment.

Worsening of a Health Condition

When you receive a medical misdiagnosis, you are unable to receive the correct treatment, and your condition could deteriorate. For instance, if you receive a misdiagnosis of a sprain when you have a broken ankle, you could do long-term damage by continuing to walk on it. In the most severe cases of misdiagnosis, such as when a doctor fails to correctly diagnose a patient’s cancer, the patient may miss the opportunity to take advantage of early intervention therapies, such as chemotherapy and radiation, and their cancer could continue to grow and spread, becoming terminal.

Unnecessary Treatment

If you receive the wrong diagnosis, you might undergo debilitating and painful surgeries and treatment that could severely impact your quality of life. For instance, if a doctor wrongly tells a patient that they have breast cancer, they may elect to undergo a mastectomy, which would turn out to be unnecessary, disfiguring surgery. Learning that they did not need the mastectomy can also have severe emotional consequences.

Our Long Island legal team understands how serious the consequences of an incorrect diagnosis can be, and we could work with you to hold the health care provider accountable in a medical negligence lawsuit. We could consult with your doctors and other medical experts to learn the full impact that the misdiagnosis has had on your current health and the anticipated effects it could have on you.

Assert Your Right to Seek Compensation

When pursuing damages for an injury caused by a misdiagnosis, including breast cancer malpractice an individual typically sues the physician and hospital responsible. To prove malpractice, the victim and their Long Island misdiagnosis attorney need to show that the doctor or other professional failed to use the appropriate level of care in the circumstances. This is a specialized standard in medical negligence cases. The victim must prove that the defendant failed to act as reasonably as a typical professional of comparable knowledge and expertise would have behaved in a similar situation. This does not mean that the doctor must be flawless, but it does require him or her to meet the level of an ordinary physician in the field.

Proving a Medical Misdiagnosis

The victim also must connect the medical professional’s breach of the standard of care to his or her harm. For example, a person claiming that a doctor failed to properly diagnose him or her with a particular illness has to show that the error caused the condition to become worse. Sometimes this may be accomplished with evidence showing that the patient would have received proper treatment sooner, had he or she been accurately diagnosed in the first place, and that the situation was exacerbated because of the delay.

The compensation available in medical malpractice cases, including heart attack malpractice, may include money for missed wages, hospital bills, the cost of future treatment, and pain and suffering. It may sometimes be worth pursuing punitive damages, which can be awarded in addition to compensatory damages and are designed to punish a defendant for especially egregious actions.

The statute of limitations in New York medical malpractice cases requires victims to bring claims within two and a half years of when they suffered the harm. In a case involving continuous treatment, the clock usually starts to run on the last day that it is provided. This can be a complicated legal issue, and it is something that you may want to discuss with an experienced misdiagnosis lawyer in Long Island that can answer your malpractice questions.

How Can We Help?

Please complete the form below and a member of our team will get in touch with you as soon as possible.

Enlist a Long Island Attorney to Hold Negligent Doctors Accountable for a Misdiagnosis

Building upon decades of combined experience, the Long Island misdiagnosis lawyers at Duffy & Duffy have guided a number of clients across Long Island and the surrounding areas through a wide range of malpractice cases. Our track record of success for those we represent includes a $25 million verdict in a failure to diagnose case and a $20 million verdict in a delayed diagnosis case. We are dedicated attorneys for misdiagnosis who focus our efforts on helping injured New York residents and their families pursue the compensation that they deserve. Contact us through our online form or call us at (516) 394-4200 to discuss your case.