Board of Medicine Reprimands Doctor for Missing Cancer
Malpractice victims often say to their lawyer: “I just want to make sure that this doesn’t happen to someone else.
Maybe it won’t this time.
A Fairfax County jury awarded one of our clients $1 million when a local internist failed to diagnose rectal cancer. The doctor not only didn’t fully appreciate the presence of rectal bleeding for years, but he didn’t refer the patient out to a specialist. At trial, specialists testified that had the patient been referred, he would not have needed to undergo the massive surgery that he had for rectal cancer.
Now the Virginia Board of Medicine has issued a formal reprimand to the doctor, who says he no longer does the “diagnostic procedures” he used in this case. He says he now readily refers his patients to a specialist.
You can read the Board of Medicine’s reprimand order of Alan Joshua, MD here. We are glad to see that Dr. Joshua’s patients have a better chance today than our client did.