Has anyone sued their GP for missed PSA tests and delayed diagnosis?

This sounds like an incredibly frustrating and stressful situation, especially when dealing with both cardiac and potential prostate health concerns. While some community members have shared experiences with malpractice situations, these cases are highly individual and depend on many factors including medical records, timing, and local laws. Consider consulting with a medical malpractice attorney who can review the specific details of your care and provide guidance on whether there are grounds for legal action. Many offer free consultations to evaluate cases and can help determine if the standard of care was met in your situation.

Dear Raymond L — I suggest you not try to pursue any legal action. The US medical-industrial system has everything pre-stacked against you. In my case, at least five physicians are directly implicated in failing to take indicated, warranted action that would have stopped my prostate cancer treatment from destroying my life with my diagnosis three years ago and subsequent overtreatment that has led to 23 adverse effects of EBRT and ADT that reduced my quality of life to zero and destroyed my marriage of 55 years. My biggest mistake was thinking that my Don’t Care Team would act in my best interest—or at least with some small consideration of my best interests. Wrong. You are the sole trusted advocate for yourself, so it’s up to you to read everything about your cancer and treatment options in the professional medical journals and the general urological and oncological press. I wised up too late to have any further chance at a life worth living, so my objective now is to set up my wife with a life she can enjoy, plus more than adequate financial resources, and then depart so she isn’t burdened every day with the increasing requirements imposed by my accelerating deterioration.

I disagree with suggestion that malpractice not be pursued. Google prostate malpractice cases. You will find settlements on the order of $1.5 million- most against primary care physicians who failed to perform screening or who failed to act on results. Standard procedure is to do a DRE because some lesions are detected although PSA doesn’t indicate suspicious cancer. DRE is not highly sensitive, but when combined with PSA, MRIs may be indicated, which adds to confidence in diagnosis of probable cancer. A primary once refused to do a PsA only, saying that he’d also have to do a DRE.

I had almost the exact same thing happen to me. What good will a lawsuit do? The money won't heal you. The stress of pursuing the lawsuit will wreck your life. If you win Healthcare gets more expensive. Lose and you get nothing. The FDA decided that PSA tests were not necessary for about a 10 year stretch that ended this year. Doctors were following that recommendation. Possibly driven by? Good luck.

The cost of treating an advanced case of prostate cancer can be 11X the cost of catching it early. That is certainly true in my case. USPSTF guidelines from 2012, and even as revised in 2018 are likely at the root of such intentionally negligent medical “care.”

It is reasonable to think that a $1.5 malpractice settlement will cause individual and institutional reflection on the manner in which patients are screened for prostate cancer. Following USPSTF guidance NOT to screen, advanced cases grew at the rate of 4-5%\yr. From 2012-2018, when the burden of decision on whether to test was placed on patients, and that during a typically rushed 15’ appointment. If 10-20% of cases are aggressive cancers, over those 7 years, 10s of thousands of aggressive cancers would have been missed. One need only browse this site to see some of those actual cases. I didn’t sue. Rather, I tried to meet with executives of my provider. I was rebuffed. My doctor advised me that they were afraid of being sued. I’m now working with a cancer prevention/treatment non-profit to get to HHS and the USPSTF in order to change guidelines on screening to include biomarker testing.