Tag: Errors
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.
Freakonomics without the facts
Kate Sheppard October 22, 2009.
Print: The Guardian, UK
I thought I had read enough about Superfreakonomics and its horrifyingly ignorant chapter on climate change to prepare myself for the actual text. But nothing could prepare me for the assault on science, logic and the English language that is this excerpt.
