Tag: Diagnosis
Diagnosis: What Doctors Are Missing
Jerome E. Groopman November 5, 2009.
Print: The New York Review of Books
Some 10 to 15 percent of all patients either suffer from a delay in making the correct diagnosis or die before the correct diagnosis is made. Misdiagnosis, it turns out, is rarely related to the doctor being misled by technical errors, like a laboratory worker mixing up a blood sample and reporting a result on the wrong patient; rather, the failure to diagnose reflects the unsuspected errors made while trying to understand a patient’s condition. These cognitive pitfalls are part of human thinking, biases that cloud logic when we make judgments under conditions of uncertainty and time pressure.
