Doctors are human and like all other human beings, we will make errors. After all, this is hardwired into being human - none of us is infallible, and medical errors are an occupational hazard of practicing medicine. What we need to worry about are the preventable errors - those which are made when the doctor doesn't think through carefully about what could be wrong with the patient who is sitting in front of him. As doctors get more experience, they start becoming overconfident, because they've seen patients with similar problems.
They start thinking mindlessly and use a checklist approach while treating the patients who come to them, especially, when the patient has what seems to be a garden variety type of common disease. It is with the common symptoms and diseases such as a headache and fever, that most problems arise especially when the diagnosis seems obvious. When the patient…
