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E.R. Doctors Misdiagnose Patients With Unusual Symptoms


“Like all medical specialties, it is possible to improve the diagnostic accuracy of emergency care,” added Dr. Kang. “All of us emergency practitioners are committed to improving care and reducing diagnostic errors.”

Doctors say that dealing with diagnostic errors is a challenge. While the National Academy of Medicine identifies medical malpractice as a serious problem problem More than 20 years ago, most efforts to improve patient safety have focused on more identifiable mistakes, such as when a patient takes a medication, said Dr. Robert Wachter, president of the institute. wrong medication or get an infection while in the hospital. medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who have not seen the full report. “Diagnostic errors are a huge part of the problem,” he said.

Dr Wachter said the deaths the report found occurred every year “is a very worrying number”. He noted that the study’s findings were higher than previous estimates.

The researchers relied primarily on studies conducted outside the United States, in countries such as Canada, Spain, and Switzerland, to provide an overall estimate of error and harm rates. But Dr Kang argues that relying on these studies may have skewed the results and caused researchers to overestimate the number of mistakes. “While most medical specialties have similar training in Western countries, emergency medicine is not,” he said.

The study’s authors acknowledge the need to do more research on emergency rooms in the United States. “We need studies done in the United States,” said Dr. Susan M. Peterson, Johns Hopkins emergency medicine physician and one of the study’s authors. “It’s a big hole in the literature.”

But she also highlights the benefit of paying more attention as doctors tend to miss an important diagnosis. In recent years, doctors have been much better at detecting heart attacks, she said, thanks to a concerted effort involving public health campaigns, better diagnostic testing and collaboration. collaboration between cardiologists and emergency physicians to solve problems.

The experts also stressed that while the study focused on mistakes made in the emergency room, where a busy doctor, dealing with overcrowding, must make quick decisions about whether a patient has a problem. Whatever the disease, the problem of misdiagnosis is a common problem of all doctors.

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