Deadly Delay

A doctor's inside story of missed chances, fatal delays, and how medics and patients-can do better.

- Dr. Fiaz Maqbool Fazili

He was only twenty. Tall, soft-spoken, and worn out from months of back pain that wouldn't go away.

He had already seen doctors, taken painkillers, undergone surgery on his spine. But when he walked into our cancer hospital in Kashmir, everything about him said something deeper was wrong.

We ran tests. He had bone metastases. Cancer, advanced. It had likely been there all along, silently growing while everyone was focused on the wrong problem.

He died shortly after.

There was nothing more we could do by the time he reached us. And what makes it harder to live with is that his story is not rare.

In just two weeks around that time, I saw five more patients who were misdiagnosed or diagnosed too late. The signs were there. The system missed them.

As a surgical oncologist, I see the aftermath of diagnostic failure every day. I see the late-stage cancers that started with symptoms as simple as a cough or back pain or unexplained fatigue.

I see the patients who had the wrong surgery, the wrong medicines, the wrong label. Some spend months being treated for diseases they don't have. Others are told they're fine, until they aren't.

Diagnostic error is one of the most dangerous and under-discussed threats in healthcare.

A recent study published in the BMJ estimated that 371,000 people are seriously harmed by misdiagnosis in the United States every year.