Misdiagnosed Conditions May Lead To Death
MEDICAL MISTAKE: A misdiagnosis is a type of medical error, which can include completely missing a diagnosis or diagnosing a patient with the wrong condition. A misdiagnosis can also be partial, such as a patient being diagnosed with the wrong type of heart disease. A delayed diagnosis occurs when a diagnosis has been made long after it should have been made. According to the National Patient Safety Foundation, one is six people have been subject to a medical error that can be attributed to a misdiagnosis.
MISDIAGNOSING HEART HEALTH: Some times, doctors miss critical warning signs that a person's heart health is in jeopardy, and as recent research points out, there especially appears to be a bias in misdiagnosing female patients. In one study, more than 200 doctors were given the medical records of a 47-year-old man and 56-year-old woman. They both had symptoms including chest pain, shortness of breath and irregular heartbeat. Most doctors diagnosed them as having the same condition, yet when "stress" was added to the list of symptoms, the heart disease diagnosis for the woman dropped to just 15 percent, but stayed at more than 50 percent for the man. In addition, more than 67 percent of the physicians referred the male patient to a cardiologist, while less than half referred the female patient. A bias was also present in drug prescriptions for the condition: men received a prescription 47 percent of the time while women received a medication just 13 percent of the time.
Another study of heart disease misdiagnosis involved the records of 10,000 patients -- 48 percent of which were women -- who had gone to the emergency room with chest pain or other heart attack symptoms. Researchers found one in every 50 heart attack patients were misdiagnosed and discharged from the hospital. Women 55 years and younger were seven times more likely to be misdiagnosed than men in the same age group. Being sent away from the hospital increased the change of dying by 50 percent.
Sunrise Hospital, Las Vegas http://www.sunrisehospital.com
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