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. There are many types of misdiagnosis such as, failure to diagnose a disease to a partial diagnosis. A partial diagnosis may misidentify the correct subtype of disease, miss medication causes, related conditions or certain complications associated with the disease. The failure to diagnose is defined as misidentifying the disease altogether.
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 complete physical exam and lab tests also hold high 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. Plus, when diagnosing the condition physical tests such as urine or blood tests may not be useful.
- Digestive diseases: Accurately diagnosing these illnesses present a challenge because of their similarity. Other digestive illnesses can have similar symptoms, which can make pinpointing the precise disease difficult.
- Illnesses with vague symptoms: Symptoms provide the clues a doctor uses to determine the type and cause of an illness. When symptoms are vague, fleeting or variable, identifying the underlying disease is difficult. 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. Because symptoms may not fit to the well-known disease patterns, rare illnesses can challenge easy classification. They may have the same symptoms of another disease and they may be diagnosed as another common disease. 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