What to Know about the Failure to Diagnose
The best treatment of a condition begins with a precise diagnosis. The failure to diagnose an illness properly can lead to extended sickness and unnecessary medical complications.
Many factors come into play when correctly diagnosing a disease: an accurate assessment of symptoms, the doctor’s knowledge of the condition, effective laboratory testing and the patient’s ability to communicate symptoms.
Because identifying an illness is a complex process, misdiagnosis is one of the more common medical mistakes. Misdiagnosis comes in many forms, from failure to diagnose a condition to a partial diangosis. A partial diagnosis may misidentify the correct subtype of disease, miss medication causes, related conditions or certain complications associated with the disease. The definition of the failure to diagnose is not identifying the illness entirely.
Misdiagnosis follows certain patterns: some diseases are more difficult to diagnose than others, while some medical settings lead to misdiagnosis more frequently than others.
Infant conditions; mental, emotional and behavioral disorders; digestive diseases; rare conditions; and illnesses with vague symptoms can all be challenging to assess accurately.
- Infant conditions: Because infants cannot communicate verbally, diagnosing an illness is naturally more challenging. Doctors must be especially attuned to behavioral signals, such as eye-rubbing or ear-pulling as possible clues to identifying illness. A thorough physical exam and lab tests also hold great importance when evaluating infants.
- Mental, emotional and behavioral disorders: The motivations and causes of human behavior range widely from one individual to another, making the correct diagnosis of these disorders difficult. In many cases, patients may not be aware of changes in their behavior or be able to accurately communicate changes in their moods or mental states. Also, physical tests, such as urine or blood tests, may not be of use when diagnosing the condition.
- Digestive diseases: Accurately diagnosing these illnesses present a challenge because of their similarity. Different digestive conditions can have the same symptoms and this can make if difficult to diagnose the exact condition.
- Illnesses with vague symptoms: Symptoms provide the clues a doctor uses to determine the type and cause of an illness. Identifying the underlying illness is hard to do when symptoms are not clear, brief or changing. For example, many conditions are associated with general fatigue, such as lupus, multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue syndrome, Lyme disease and hypothyroidism.
- Rare conditions: Diagnosing an illness depends, in part, on recognizing patterns and making correlations between symptoms. Rare conditions can defy easy classification because they may not fit familiar disease patterns. Patterns that are similar to another condition, can be diagnosed as another common. In addition, if a doctor have never came across a disease that is rare they are more likely not to correctly diagnose the illness.
The location of the patient's diagnosis can also influence in how accuracy of the assessment. The failure to diagnose a condition precisely happens more so in emergency rooms. The time and environmental pressure involved in diagnosing patients in an ER help account for the greater incidence of misdiagnosis in this setting. Most malpractice cases are from the failure to diagnose patients correctly. Among the top misdiagnosed conditions leading to malpractice lawsuits are breast cancer, myocardial infarction, lung cancer and colon cancer.
The failure to diagnose a disease delays proper treatment and increases the probability of the disease causing harm. To be sure you received a proper diagnosis, getting a second opinion is the best way. Multiple opinions can be invaluable, especially when it comes to diseases that are inherently hard to diagnose.
Tags: diagnose, disease, failure to diagnose, misdiagnosis