Question Queen Martian CandyBar! asked:
Has there ever been a case where something was wrong with you or a loved one, you or they go to the ER the doctor said there wasn’t anything wrong it’s all in your head, then later on, come to find out, you or they might have cancer or some other illness, such as diabetes, heart problems, etc.
Also, have you or a loved one ever been misdiagnosed or wrongfully diagnosed by a doctor, whether it’s for physical health or mental health reasons?
As a rule. don’t get sick in the summer, because, that is when
all the interns start their practice. }:-})
My sister is a cancer survivor, bless her little heart. She was being treated in a hospital that was 4 hours away from my parents home, and she would come home about every other week or so. During these weeks it was up to the local bandaid hospital to draw her blood to check her platelet count. Well during a week that she was home, she fell in the tub and started having period bleeding (which is NOT supposed to happen during chemo therapy and is dangerous). My parents took her into the local hospital for labs and to possibly at least get some platelets in her and emergency transport to the other hospital. The local hospital discharged her without doing one thing, and told my mom to drive 4 hours with my sister in the car. Needless to say my sister was almost dead from bleeding when she finally got to the hospital, and she had pretty much lost the will to live. For some reason she was still alive, and I called up the local hospital and let them have it on my parents behalf (I am also in the healthcare field). There was no reason the local hospital couldn’t have found emergency transport to the hospital 4 hours away. The hospital I worked at was only 45 minutes away and we are equipped with an emergency chopper and emergency ambulance service that could have been used. It was an emergency room doctor being lazy and insufficient.
I have gone to the ER for excruciating headaches and was told that I had a migraine only to find out that I had viral meningitis. However in the Doctors defense that are not perfect they are only judging from their previous experiences and from the knowledge they acquired in school. Every case is not a textbook case and they are never perfect. If you are your family member knows something is wrong then you must be persistent about letting you doctor know that, changing doctors if you have too. The best judge of what’s going on with your body is you, the doctor is only there to interpret the problem and hopefully help you find a solution to it.
To answer you question they make the same amount of mistakes that you make on the job because at the end of the day they are only human.
I was saddened to learn of the death of a lady I’d treated for pain on several occasions. She had, over perhaps six months, multiple CT scans and MRI’s, and had seen a double handful of specialists, all of them missing her cancer. Some had accused her of abusing the system to obtain narcotics, but I learned long ago not to be quite so sure of my diagnoses.
There isn’t very much in medicine that’s 100% certain, and it’s wise to remember that.
Yes, doctors do make mortal mistakes. My littel niece almost got deformed from poor diagnosis by a doctor. That’s why we have this saying, doctors bury their mistakes but engineers get buried by their mistakes. They always have a way of explaining themselves out of their mistake to the lay man (that is, you and I).