What to Know about the Failure to Diagnose
The best treatment of an illness starts with a correct 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 can take several forms, from the failure to diagnose an illness 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 detailed physical exam and lab tests also hold great importance when an infant is being assessed.
- 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. 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. Rare conditions can defy easy classification because they may not fit familiar disease patterns. They may have the same symptoms of another disease and they may be diagnosed as another common disease. Additionally, if a rare disease was never encountered by a particular doctor, the chances they will diagnose the illness accurately is low.
What can influence an assessment’s accuracy is where a patient is diagnosed also. 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. A large portion of malpractice cases result from the failure to diagnose patients properly. 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. Seeking a second opinion is one of the best methods of ensuring proper diagnosis. Multiple opinions can be invaluable, especially when it comes to diseases that are inherently hard to diagnose.
