| The New York Times.
As I talked with my patient and examined her abdomen, my mind ran through this list, prioritizing what diagnoses seemed more likely while trying to keep in mind the more serious conditions that I couldn’t afford to miss. But the question remained in my head: Would I get the diagnosis correct?
Diagnostic accuracy is fiendishly difficult to measure precisely, but it is estimated that doctors get it wrong in one out of 10 to one out of 20 cases. Up until now, the focus of the patient safety movement has been on errors of medical treatment — incorrect medications or dosages, postoperative complications, hospital-acquired infections. But diagnostic errors — incorrect or delayed diagnoses — may be more common and potentially more deadly. The Institute of Medicine has taken up the subject, and its new report offers the chilling observation that nearly everyone will experience at least one diagnostic error in their lifetimes.
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Danielle Ofri’s newest book is What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine. She is a physician at Bellevue Hospital and an associate professor of medicine at N.Y.U. School of Medicine, as well as editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. She spoke on Deconstructing Our Perception of Perfection at TEDMED.
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