Medical misdiagnosis refers to the act of diagnosing a patient with a medical condition that they do not have or failing to diagnose a patient with anything. Medical misdiagnosis is a complex topic that will usually require the expertise of medical practitioners in order to determine.

If a doctor misdiagnoses a patient and that patient goes on to suffer a worsening of their health as a result of that misdiagnosis, then there can be a legal case against the doctor, their practice, or the corporation that employs them. In order to prove misdiagnosis there are a number of factors that must be accounted for including a failure to account for differential diagnoses and an injury that was the direct result of the misdiagnosis.

Not every instance of misdiagnosis rises to the civil wrong of malpractice. In general, misdiagnosis must result in incorrect treatment, ineffective treatment, or no treatment that then leads to a worsening of the patient’s health in order to qualify as misdiagnosis.

In order to prove misdiagnosis there must be three proven elements: a doctor-patient relationship, a failure to live up to a standard of care, and an actual injury caused by that failure. Proving a doctor-patient relationship is the simplest step. The more difficult steps are demonstrating a failure to live up to a standard of care and demonstrate how that failure led to injury. Generally, an expert witness will be brought in to assess the doctor’s methodology and differential diagnosis procedure to examine whether the misdiagnosis was in line with conventional logic.