Failure To Diagnose / Misdiagnosis

The primary care physician in charge of coordinating your medical care is critical to your health and longevity. They are responsible for managing your care and for helping you determine what afflictions may have caused your symptoms. Only once they properly diagnose you can they then recommend a course of treatment that will help you manage the condition. Unfortunately, many doctors fail in their basic obligation to patients when it comes time to properly diagnose them. Failing to diagnose a patient or diagnosing them improperly can have catastrophic health consequences. How common is this...

Ending up in a hospital's emergency room is never a great experience -- but there's an extra layer of stress added on top of the situation because you're forced into getting your care from an unfamiliar doctor. On top of that, emergency room doctors are often less-experienced than those in private practice -- and may be running on fumes in the middle of a long shift on the floor. All of those factors can lead to medical mistakes, including a missed or incorrect diagnosis. According to reports, around 100,000 people die in the United States each year due to preventable hospital errors. How do...

Kidney disease is a silent problem for a lot of Americans and goes hand-in-hand with two other major medical problems: diabetes and high blood pressure. In fact, about 14 percent of the general population suffers from chronic kidney disease and doesn't know it. Could you (and, more importantly, your doctor) be overlooking these slowly-manifesting signs of impending kidney failure? 1. A change in your need to urinate What's normal for you is what's important here. If you suddenly find yourself going to the bathroom all the time or not going hardly at all, that's a concern that should be...

Meniere's disease can be devastating to its victims. The symptoms of an acute attack can strike without warning, causing severe vertigo, nausea, vomiting, a high-pitched ringing in your ears and sudden deafness that can last for some time. The attacks can absolutely ruin victims' ability to work and wreck their lives in general. Sufferers frequently have to endure intensive dietary restrictions and lifestyle changes to try to control the disease. There are a few medications that can sometimes help the condition or be used to manage symptoms. If those don't work and attacks continue, patients...

Pulmonary embolisms, or blood clots that can suddenly develop in a patient's lungs, are life-threatening emergencies. These clots interfere with the body's ability to remove carbon dioxide from its system and process oxygen. It can also block the blood flow from the heart to the lungs. Patients can develop severe difficulty breathing and -- if the clot is large enough -- even die. Sometimes, pulmonary embolisms strike without warning. Many times, however, there are risk factors that doctors can use to assess the possibility and early signs of a problem that can be detected. Prompt diagnosis...

Mental illness is a serious problems for Americans. Around one out of every 25 people in the country suffers from a severe mental condition in any given year. Unfortunately, not everyone gets the help that they need. Mental diseases like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and severe clinical depression can be easily misdiagnosed or missed entirely. For example, studies have indicated that general practitioners misdiagnosed people with depression quite often. Over half of the people they diagnose with depression don't actually have the disorder. On the other hand, bipolar patients often struggle...

Women who have heart attacks are more likely than men to die of their condition -- mostly because they and their doctors don't realize what is happening until it's too late. While medical professionals have known for a while that women often experience different symptoms of heart attack than men, a recent study indicates that over half of the doctors treating women for heart attacks don't even recognize those symptoms. That means women are at a significantly-greater risk of being misdiagnosed with something other than a heart attack when they first seek care. All too often, that misdiagnosis...

Diabetes is a common condition in the United States. A combination of genetics, fairly sedentary lifestyles and easy access to rich foods with high carbohydrate and sugar contents makes it an easy condition to acquire -- especially as people age. The majority of diabetics have Type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetics are not insulin-dependent. Instead, their bodies simply can't use the insulin they produce efficiently, creating insulin resistance. Treatment can include medication that helps them properly use the insulin they have -- and some can even control their condition through diet and...

Type 2 diabetes is a common disorder among both children and adults in the United States. Associated with both inactivity and obesity, it can strike at any time and causes a number of potential additional health complications: A low resistance to infections Chronic yeast infections in your urinary tract or skin Kidney damage (to the point that your kidneys can fail and you may need a transplant) Difficulty healing after small injuries, especially on the extremities Heart attacks or strokes, as a result of cardiovascular disease and the strain diabetes puts on the entire body Nerve damage,...

A missed or delayed cancer diagnosis not only means that you may have to endure harder, more aggressive treatments than you would have if the disease had been spotted earlier, it also means that your chances of survival are diminished. Information is your best weapon against medical malpractice -- which is why knowing how some of the most common cancers are overlooked can help you avoid becoming a victim: 1. Skin cancer It's tragic to die from skin cancer these days because the survival rate is 98 percent when the cancer is detected early. Once it reaches the lymph nodes, survival drops to...