Inappropriate Diagnoses

Getting a treatment may be the easy part for a lot of patients when today, the current rate of missed/misdiagnosis is around 40%. A missed diagnosis refers to a lack of diagnosis, which results in no treatment or inaccurate treatment. For example, diagnosing a tumor as benign when it is in fact malignant would be an example of a missed diagnosis, resulting in the patient not getting the treatment they need. A misdiagnosis refers to the patient getting diagnosed for a different condition than they have, such as pneumonia getting mistaken for the common cold.?

Often, there is no way to know of an incorrect diagnosis until it is too late, when an autopsy exam reveals that the patient had something else all along. While one might have expected improvements in the rate of misdiagnosis over the years of advances in modern medicine, the rate of misdiagnoses hasn’t changed much in the past 100 years.

Additionally, it’s difficult to correctly estimate the number of misdiagnoses that occur, as there is no requirement to report them and no consistent source of data. However, it is often difficult to convince doctors to accept misdiagnosis as a significant and present problem and treat it as such, when their legitimacy rests on their ability to correctly diagnose and treat a patient. As the saying goes, “the doctor is always right.”?

The problem of misdiagnosis among the medical community is something that some experts think is rooted in what doctors are taught at medical school. The vast amount of knowledge that doctors are assumed to be able to obtain and use for a number of different patients with different conditions can lead to many opportunities for misdiagnosis, and has led to specialization among doctors. Because of this tendency toward specialization that has come about, standardization within work environments, such as different hospital wards, is seen as a potential solution.?

Misdiagnosis and missed diagnosis are both common enough for a patient to consider in some cases that it might be the diagnosis rendering the treatment ineffective, and not the treatment itself that isn’t working. The frequency at which these inaccurate diagnoses occur is high enough to make it viable for patients to stay informed about the diagnostic process, and to pay close attention to their responses to treatments. One important thing that patients can do is to engage with their doctor in their diagnostic process, asking questions such as “what else could this be?”?

When doctors diagnose patients, they use a process called differential diagnosis. In this process, doctors draw several possible conclusions about what a patient might have based on descriptions of symptoms, medical tests, background knowledge and any additional input. Then, these conclusions are in turn eliminated one by one based on what the doctor believes fits and what doesn’t.?

For patients who believe they may have been wrongly diagnosed, asking a doctor about why some diagnostic possibilities were eliminated and not others might make a difference. Asking questions like these are important, as they allow the patient and doctor together to fill in any missing or incorrect information, ensuring that the doctor was eliminating possible diagnoses based on correct evidence. For example, a doctor might have misunderstood a patient’s interpretation of a symptom, or a patient might not have been entirely truthful with a doctor when disclosing their medical history, leaving out a detail that they didn’t assume was important but was in fact crucial.?

Discussing and reviewing the evidence used by a doctor to determine their patient’s diagnosis can lead to discovery and a reassessment of the previous diagnoses eliminating, helping to prevent the occurrence of misdiagnosis.