subject: How If Physician Assumes You Just Have Hemorrhoids, You May Still Have Colon Cancer [print this page] Being told one has colon cancer tends to bring up worry in most of people. It can therefore feel highly reassuring to have your doctor say that you simply have hemorrhoids. That there is no need to be concerned about the blood in your stool. However this reassurance should only come after the physician has eliminated the likelihood of colon cancer (and other possibly serious gastrointestinal problems). Otherwise, you may not find out that you have colon cancer until it is too late. If a physician automatically assumes that complaints of blood in the stool or rectal bleeding by a patient are the result of hemorrhoids and it subsequently turns out to be colon cancer, that physician may not have met the standard of care and the patient might be able to pursue a lawsuit against that doctor.
It is generally thought that there are currently at least 10 million men and women with hemorrhoids. An additional million new instances of hemorrhoids will likely occur this year as opposed to a little over the 100 thousand new instances of colon cancer that will be identified this year. Further, colon cancers do not always. When they do, the bleeding might be intermittent. Also subject to the location of the cancer in the colon, the blood might not actually be apparent in the stool. Maybe it is in part as a result of the difference in the volume of instances being identified that some doctors simply consider that the existence of blood in the stool or rectal bleeding is because of hemorrhoids. This amounts to gambling, pure and simple. A physician who reaches this conclusion is going to be correct more than 90% of the time. It seems reasonable, right? The concern, however, is that if the physician is inaccurate in this diagnosis, the patient may not learn he or she has colon cancer until it has developed to an advanced stage, perhaps even to the point where it is no longer treatable.
In the event colon cancer is found before it metastasizes outside the colon, the individual's 5 year survival rate will generally be above 80%. The 5 year survival rate is a statistical indicator of the percentage of individuals who are still alive at least 5 years after diagnosis. Treatment protocols for early stage colon cancer often requires only surgery to take out the cancerous growth and adjacent sections of the colon. Subject to factors such as how advanced the cancer is and the individual's medical history , how old the person is, and the patient's physical condition, chemotherapy may or may not be necessary.
For this reason doctors frequently advise that a colonoscopy ought to be completed immediately if someone has blood in the stool or rectal bleeding. A colonoscopy is a procedure that uses a flexible tube with a camera on the end is employed to see the interior of the colon. If anything is detected in the course of the procedure, it may be possible to take it out immediately should it not be very large. In any case, it will be biopsied to check for cancer. Colon cancer may properly be ruled out as the reason for the blood only if a colonoscopy locates no cancer
However, if the cancer is not detected until it has spread past the colon into the lymph nodes, the individual's 5 year survival rate will generally be approximately 53%. Aside from surgery to remove the tumor and adjacent portions of the colon treatment for this stage of colon cancer calls for chemotherapy in an attempt to remove any cancer that may remain in the body. When the cancer reaches distant organs for example the liver, lungs, or brain, the individual's five year survival rate is lowered to close to 8%. If treatment options exist for a patient at this point, they may include surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and other medications. Treatment may or may not still be effective the moment the cancer is this advanced. When treatment ceases to be effective, colon cancer is fatal. This year, about 48,000 people will die in the U.S. from metastatic colon cancer.
By telling the patient that blood in the stool or rectal bleeding as caused by hemorrhoids without conducting the right tests to eliminate the possibility of colon cancer, a physician places the patient at risk of not learning he or she has colon cancer before it reaches an advanced, possibly untreatable, stage. This may amount to a departure from the accepted standard of medical care and might end in a malpractice claim.
