Did Your Doctor Diagnose Cancer With A Pregnancy Test?

When physicians diagnose cancer, they should be sure that they are using the correct test to verify the illness before going forward with treatment. Otherwise, a person could be harmed by unnecessary medical intervention.

Every test comes with a unique set of rules and instructions. A physician should be familiar with the individual tests that they employ for diagnosis of illness, especially terminal diseases. Unfortunately, some women found out too late that their doctors diagnosed them with cancer from pregnancy test results.

Cancer misdiagnosis

Certain blood levels are indicators of cancer. For example, a person who has a high level of the hormone HCG may have a rare cancerous tumor. The tumor associated with HCG is a gestational trophoblastic tumor. This type of cancer can be deadly if left untreated, but it shows a positive response to chemotherapy when caught and treated early.

False positives with pregnancy tests

When a woman goes to a physician for a pregnancy test, the test measures for the HCG hormone. If the test shows high HCG, a physician will then order an ultrasound to confirm the pregnancy. If the ultrasound does not locate a fetus, then the physician should investigate the cause of the elevated hormone levels in the body.

A cancer diagnosis is one reason for the elevation, but not the only one. Certain individuals have natural substances in their blood that will give a false positive to this test. This irregularity can occur in up to 10 percent of the population.

Physicians fail to test properly

A pregnancy test is not a cancer test. If a physician suspects cancer, he or she should confirm the diagnosis with a cancer screening test. If you were harmed because a doctor jumped from a pregnancy test reading to surgery and chemotherapy without exhausting other means of analysis for the presence of cancer, you may have been treated unnecessarily.

Denied claim?

To add insult to injury, some patients are denied reimbursement for medical treatment received even when the insurance company knows mistakes were made. Too often insurance carriers wrongfully deny claims. A bad faith claim may also be necessary to recover your losses and receive compensation you are rightly owed for medical malpractice.