Is It A Cyst Or Breast Cancer? - Your Life May Depend On An Accurate Diagnosis

Women trust that their physicians will understand the difference between a substantial health concern and something that fails to present any risk to their health. A particular issue to which this apples is with breast cancer. Female patients count on physicians to obtain every appropriate tests to find any cancer that may exist in the earliest stage achievable. The existence of a lump in a breast raises worry immediately. And here is where the doctor can do the right thing or the wrong thing. The majority of doctors acknowledge that the right thing is to perform tests to establish whether that lump is cancerous. The reason most doctors concur that this is the right course of action is because a doctor cannot ascertain if the lump is cancerous or benign after merely on a physical examination (even when taken together with other factors like the woman’s age and family history).

Approximately some eighty percent of breast associated issues are not due to breast cancer. Additional, the majority of new breast cancer cases occur in females who are older than fifty. It is therefore not surprising that a number of physicians will diagnose an abnormal finding from a clinical breast examination, particularly with a younger patient, as being only a cyst and not from breast cancer. The statistics are in favor of such a diagnosis.

Regrettably, this is not the end of the story. If breast cancer is found before it can reach a late stage (for example, stage 0, stage I or stage II), the 5-year survival rate is normally over eighty percent. The 5-year survival rate is a statistical measure used by cancer specialists to discern the fraction of patients who survive the cancer for beyond 5 years following detection. Therefore, a five-year survival rate above 80% means that, statistically, over 80 out of every 100 patients with a less advanced stage breast cancer will, with appropriate treatment, survive the disease for at least 5 years beyond detection.

Should cancer of the breast not be detected until it gets to a stage III (typically involving bigger tumors in the breast or a spread of the cancer to lymph nodes), the five-year survival rate falls to around 54%. For stage IV (generally involving a cancerous mass that is bigger that five cm or the spread of the cancer to the bone or distant organs), the five-year survival rate is around 20%.

It is estimated that one in eight women will have breast cancer in the course of their lifetime. Cancer of the breast is the 2nd most often diagnosed cancer in women. Over one hundred ninety thousand women are expected to be newly diagnosed with invasive breast cancer this year. Moreover over forty nine thousand females are predicted to pass away of breast cancer this year. Given that women whose breast cancer is detected and treated in the early stages have a better than eighty percent expectation of surviving the cancer for more than five years following diagnosis, a question that should be asked is what percentage of those forty thousand or more females who will pass away of this disease this year might otherwise continue leading their lives if their cancer had been detected early.

The challenge is that some physicians behave as though either that they can ascertain whether a mass in a woman’s breast is cancerous or benign just by manual examination or that a female younger than fifty with no family history of breast cancer is so unlikely to have breast cancer that there is no need to do any diagnostic tests to exclude the possibility of cancer if she had a lump in her breast. Because the majority of doctors would agree that noticing a lump in a woman’s breast should be followed by diagnostic testing, for example, an untrasound, mammogram, aspiration or biopsy. Only by using one or more of these tests can cancer be safely ruled out

When a physician diagnoses a mass in the breast of a female patient as nothing more than a benign fibroid cyst based only on a clinical breast examination, that doctor places the patient in jeopardy of not learning she has breast cancer until it metastasizes. Not performing appropriate diagnostic testing, including an imaging study such as a mammogram or ultrasound, or a sampling, such as a biopsy or aspiration, might amount to a departure from the accepted standard of medical care and might bring about a medical malpractice case.

By: J. Hernandez

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Joseph Hernandez is an Attorney accepting medical malpractice cases. You can learn more about breast cancer metastasis and colon cancer metastasis by visiting the websites