There are many different medical conditions people suffer from that doctors can misdiagnose or not diagnose at all. Delayed diagnoses and missed diagnoses put people’s lives at risk, which is why it’s so important for medical providers to do all they can to identify a person’s health issue as quickly and accurately as possible.
Around one in 20 adults is misdiagnosed, receives a delayed diagnosis or gets no diagnosis at all, according to the Institute of Medicine. That doesn’t seem like a lot of people, but when you consider how many people live in the United States, those errors end up making a huge impact. The errors above lead to, or at the very least contribute to, around 10 percent of patient deaths.
The issue with a misdiagnosis is not that a doctor didn’t try to diagnose a condition but that the doctor identified the wrong problem. Sometimes, patients don’t speak up, but it’s typically obvious when a standard procedure or treatment doesn’t work that something hasn’t been diagnosed correctly. When you get a diagnosis, some doctors will stop trying to diagnose you, and that’s a problem. Doctors should always question their diagnoses and make sure they are as accurate as possible based on the facts and the symptoms occurring at the moment.
So, which conditions are the most likely to be misdiagnosed?
Heart attacks are one of the main conditions. The fact is that many issues mimic heart attacks, from panic attacks to gas. The symptoms aren’t the same for everyone, either. Cancers are also hard to detect in some instances.
Regardless of the situation, if a doctor misdiagnoses you because of negligence, it’s within your rights to pursue a claim.
Source: Fox News Health, “The 3 cancers doctors miss most, plus 4 other commonly misdiagnosed conditions,” Lacie Glover, accessed Nov. 02, 2017