Have you ever wondered that? I know I have. Well now someone has written a book about it (How Doctors Think by Professor Jerome Groopman).
We need to know how doctors think because, it seems, 15% of diagnoses they make are wrong.
Professor Groopman does not attribute this to poor medical knowledge. Rather he thinks that doctors fall into what he calls easy traps of bad thinking.
These include - for example – not considering multiple possibilities when making a diagnosis: being influenced in their judgement by the frequency with which particular conditions come up, confirming their suspicions by ignoring information which doesn’t fit, or coming up with the most likely diagnosis under time pressure.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Of course these are errors all of us can make in our day to day working lives. But for doctors their consequences are more severe. Which means we as patients need to do our bit to minimise the chances of mistakes.
Luckily the Professor comes up with some suggestions for what patients should ask to stop their doctor making a mistake.
Just ask questions like:
- What else could it be?
- Could it be more than one problem?
- What’s the worst thing it could be?
Even better, try and get your doctor to talk to you!
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