This is a Chapter from my forthcoming book, Patient Safety - Protect yourself from Medical Errors. Diagnosis plays a central role in medicine, and making the right diagnosis is pivotal in helping the patient to get the right care. Making a diagnosis is a complex exercise, because patients don't come with labels saying I suffer from so-and-so. There is probably no task more challenging for a doctor than making the correct diagnosis.
The doctor needs to be a detective in order to figure out what's wrong, and it's because there is so much that we still have yet to learn about the human body, that diagnosis is still a very uncertain art. It takes considerable clinical acumen to make the right diagnosis, which is why one in every ten diagnoses is wrong. Diagnostic error is the leading cause of medical malpractice claims in the US, and is estimated to cause 40,000-80,000 deaths annually. It's…
