by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters 

Australian researcher Dr. Mary Dahm and I were emailing back and forth about her recently published study on diagnostic uncertainty in medicine (one of my favourite subjects, I might add – especially when it involves female heart patients).  I mentioned to her that the Emergency physician who had misdiagnosed my heart attack as acid reflux seemed remarkably confident at the time – despite being remarkably wrong. That misplaced confidence is what researchers who study diagnostic error call unwarranted certainty – a contributing risk factor for misdiagnosis.  But Dr. Dahm raised the issue of whether diagnosing is what Emergency physicians actually do:

“The question about whether or not Emergency Department doctors diagnose is highly contested within the specialty. Regardless, they do exclude life-and limb-threatening conditions.”          .
Continue reading “Do Emergency physicians diagnose? Or not?” →