Negligence in the healthcare system breeds stress and unrivaled fear in the lives of many cancer patients. To have cancer is already an uphill battle for all patients and their family members due to costs, psychological struggles, and the associated weakness of the condition. However, even more unprecedented and frequently underlying terror comes with the validity of the offered treatment. Due to a lack of interest in their patients, many hospitals fail to provide every patient with a thorough and accurate treatment plan. Whether unnoticed or realized, mistakes in diagnosis cause increased stress on the patient while endangering their lives further.

While many institutions hope to take absolute care of all present and future patients, oftentimes the sheer number of the ill outweighs that of the providers. This leads to a lack of attention given to each patient. In large hospitals, new patients are dehumanized from people with serious problems to just another name added to a long list of unfortunate cases. As doctors are pulled left and right to aid an overwhelming number of patients, some details can be overlooked in the diagnosis process, especially with new patients or those whose cancer returns. These oversights, paired with a lack of understandable information shared with patients formulate a distrust between the patient and the provider. With too many patients and too little time, doctors may leave out important details when discussing treatment with their patients, leaving the patient out of the know so the doctor can perform treatments as they wish. Many malpractice claims may appear due to these actions. Some patients may have not been informed of a life-saving treatment due to insufficient physician guidance, leading to cases studied by experts such as Eugene Chung.

While some doctors may blatantly leave out information when caring for patients, some make predictions and create misdiagnoses based on poor data from scans. When reviewing tumor scans, some doctors will often overlook a formation or misread the data to be a different form of cancer. This leads to inadequate treatment or even completely incorrect treatment for many patients. By misreading the data, or accepting a prediction based on old data, doctors can put their patients into highly compromising medical positions. For example, if a woman were to have been cured of her original breast cancer, yet it came back in a different form years later, the doctors may assume the tumors are the same. While cancers can come back in different forms, doctors may assume the patient has the same cancer they had before, and provide them with the wrong treatment. This lack of care can lead to an array of health problems in the patient and even future negligence to that patient and others.

The negligence and mistreatment of cancer patients is an omnipresent issue in current healthcare. While malpractice with certain providers can harm a myriad of patients with diverse forms of cancer, it also urges this large medical audience to seek alternative care options. Smaller clinics and out-of-state institutions may not be the best option for full treatment, but they open the door for a diagnosis confirmation. As more misinformation is spread concerning cancer diagnoses, patients may turn to outside clinics to gain a second opinion on their treatment. This allows for many medical experts to work together to not only provide the best treatment for their patients but also learn more about cancer behaviors to grant better assistance to patients in the future.

This article was edited by Ipek Unal.