Prostate cancer is a dreadful disease. While not 100% accurate doctors use diagnostics tests to doctors to determine if a patient has the cancer. Yet due to the chance of false negatives (a negative test result although the patient in reality has cancer) physicians have to follow up and repeat tests as appropriate when patient symptoms and screening tests keep showing the possibility of cancer. Not doing so might reslt in a malpractice claim.
In one published claim a man told his doctor that he was having urinary frequency and burning. The doctor started him on antibiotics and refered the man to a urologist. The urologist conducted a cystoscopy which revealed that the man had an enlarged prostate. The urologist also ordered a PSA blood test which registered a 16.3 (a level above a 4.0 is generally thought to be high). Therefore the urologist did a biopsy 2 months later. The biopsy was interpreted by a pathologist as showing no evidence of cancer.