What trips people up most is that a wrong diagnosis is not automatically medical malpractice. A clinician can make a difficult judgment call and still meet the accepted standard of care. Misdiagnosis means a health professional identifies the wrong illness, injury, or condition instead of the one a patient actually has. It can involve confusing one disease for another, reading test results incorrectly, or attributing symptoms to a less serious cause when a different condition is present.

The practical problem is the harm that follows. A patient may get the wrong medication, the wrong procedure, or no treatment at all while the real condition gets worse. That can matter after many kinds of injuries, including head trauma from a crash on a narrow West Virginia road, where symptoms of a traumatic brain injury might be mistaken for a concussion, intoxication, or stress. In a legal claim, the key question is often whether a reasonably careful provider would have made the correct diagnosis, or at least ordered further testing or referral.

In West Virginia, misdiagnosis claims are generally governed by the Medical Professional Liability Act, W. Va. Code §55-7B. The usual filing deadline is tied to West Virginia's statute of limitations for medical negligence, often two years, though the discovery rule and other exceptions can affect timing. Expert review is often central to proving causation and damages.