Misdiagnosing the live and the dead : Neuron Culture

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I write articles on science, medicine, nature, culture and other matters for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, National Geographic, Scientific American Mind, and other publications, and am working on my fourth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion, which expands on my recent December 2009 Atlantic article. In August 2010, I'll be moving to London for a year to work on the book. I'll also serve as a senior fellow at City University London's MA science journalism program.

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Misdiagnosing the live and the dead

Posted on: September 22, 2009 8:50 AM, by David Dobbs

"One in six patients 'wrongly diagnosed by NHS doctors'," shouts the Daily Mail (via EvidenceMatters. This should not surprise us: Autopsies have been finding a similar percentage of misdiagnosis among the dead for decades. Doctors will always miss some diagnoses. Progress is a matter of ever narrowing the list of things doctors miss -- so the other problems can be diagnosed and treated, letting the patients live longer (till they did of something incurable -- or something we still haven't learned to diagnose. Learn to properly diagnose, say, appendicitis, and you can save the life of a10-year-old (as I was when I had my appendix out) and let him die decades later of old age, something incurable -- or something the doctor misses then.

Hard to accept that doctors miss things. They always will. The shame is that they so often miss things and then bury the mistakes -- as they do now about 10-15% of the time. Doing so removes the opportunity to learn from the mistake and save the patient from the same one.