A doctor's failure to diagnose cancer.

Was she diagnosed here or in Australia? doctors are not infallible but if she had to see a doctor 5 times before they did anything, did the doctor not even ask did she want the wart or cysts removed?

It a very sad case.

My pal was misdiagnosed cancer for over 2 year's and was dead within 8 weeks once he got a second opinion, it can happen sadly...

Very sad story, must have been very hard on such a young woman with a young family to hear such devastating news. I worry about the future of our health and mental health services as they seem to be struggling at present and our population is set to be increased in the coming decades I don't know how bad things will get. Thoughts are with her family.

I feel really sorry for the woman, but I feel her anger is misplaced.

She was misdiagnosed in Australia, yet she criticised the Irish system. If she had remained in Ireland, perhaps she would have been diagnosed quicker. Skin cancer is treated more seriously here as the cultural approach in Australia is far different.

She is also extremely unlucky as she came home at the wrong time, just as the Irish health system was devastated by a cyber-attack and understandably, it was quicker to redo the scans than to wait for the system to be fixed and then access her data from Australia.

A very sad story, but misplaced anger.

What are we supposed to be discussing op ,

Yes it's quite a sad story but what is your opinion on something like this .

Yes we are all aware how bad our health services are but this has nothing to do with this ,

The hack was beyond anyone's control it was just bad luck she came back when she did

Context in relation to what? The late diagnosis in Australia, the unprovoked hack, the terminal diagnosis?

Unfortunately, in addition to a cruel diagnosis, she arrived in both the middle of a pandemic and at the time of a criminal hack which affected HSE data systems.

She should have stayed in Australia. I think this story is possibly missing a significant part. Melanoma usually starts as a discoloured and irregular skin blemish/patch/mole. If it developes past a certain point without being dignosed and metastises, you are finished, it being one of the most aggresive cancers there is. One of the consequences of the latter stages is lumps - tumors - under the skin.

Australia has a very high incidence of Melanoma, and consequently, doctors there are generally acutely aware of the problem and are on the lookout and are hyper-aware, so I wonder if the GP she saw received their medical training overseas. Also, and alternatively, the 'lump' might not have been the original skin tumor, which was elsewhere and was missed, so it didn't look like a melanoma to the DR. Another possibility if it was the original tumor is that it was growing down vertically and was missed because it didn't look the part.

My brother was an Australian living in London. He went to a UK GP about a new and growing skin blemish on his abdomen. He was told it was nothing. It continued and my brother didn't like the look of it and so he went back and asked the GP to cut it out, which he did. The wound wasn't healing properly so the GP injected it with Cortisone. Still not healing properly and likely not looking right, the GP excised a bit more, sent it for analysis and injected more cortisone.

The analysis came back that it was Melanoma. Possibly due to GP gross failures and possibly it was too late by the first GP visit, but my brother was dead within two years. Apparently the original tumor had spread down vertically and so was less obvious than if it had been more horizontal.

I still think to this day that if he had gone to an Australian GP, it might have been more likely to have been recognised and caught in time.

Melanomas can be very difficult to suspect if they are not pigmented, i.e. amelanotic melanoma. Various benign cysts are common on the scalp, far commoner than melanoma. A friend of mine in Canada had a scalp melanoma misdiagnosed as benign after it had been removed and sent for pathological exam. All sorts of errors can be made and they are made in every country.

The article does not say that the doctor assumed that the lump was only a wart or a cyst. We're not told what investigations or diagnostic procedures were undertaken, or why it wasn't diagnosed as melanoma earlier. Ironically, the only "false assumption" that I can see is the OP's - he assumes that, because the cancer wasn't diagnosed earlier, (a) it could and should have been diagnosed earlier; and (b) the reason it wasn't is because the treating doctor simply assumed, without investigation, that the growth was a wart or cyst. We don't know that either of these things are true.

And, even if they are true, the conclusion drawn ("The fact that this catastrophically false assumption took place in Australia puts a question mark on the quality of healthcare in that country") is unwarranted, or at best can only be warranted in a sense that is so watered-down as to be meaningless. Even granted the OP's assumption, all we've established is that there is at least one doctor in Australia who for at least one patient fallen below acceptable professional standards of competence. If that puts a question mark on the quality of medical care in Australia, I'd be reasonably confident that a similar question mark hangs over the quality of medical care in every country in the world. And that's not particularly surprising, or particularly useful, information to have.

In relation to cervical check, you are making the common mistake of equating screening with diagnosis. The issue there was around screening which will always have false negatives.

In fact the main issue was around failing to tell women that their earlier screening could have given a positive result. What is forgotten however is that these were all women who were already being treated for cancer and whose earlier screenings were then audited. This communication error had no effect on their treatment. The Minister, other politicians and the media all raised unnecessary fears among women by not explaining this clearly.

I just used the cervical check as an example of cancer mis-diagnosis.

Ok you call it screening, or whatever you want, but the end results were that some women could have been treated much earlier so don't try the cr** about how it had no effect on their outcomes.

And false negatives are one thing, multiple false negatives for the one patient are another thing.

The way some absolutely terrible prognosis was communicated to some patients was bordering on sadistic.

A fooking vet would have been better at it than some of these so called very well educated medical professionals.

And it is not just cervical that has cock ups with terrible mis diagnosis.

There isn't a test in the world that doesn't have false negatives.

SHould our health services no longer use tests until scientists can create the 'perfect test' i.e. one with no false negatives or false positives?

No screening program is perfect. That’s how the the world is. Error can be reduced but it cannot be eliminated.