How to avoid misdiagnosis by doctors?

Mondo Health Updated on 2024-01-31

I believe that the first question that many people encounter when seeing a doctor must be: which department to hang on. Looking at the dense distribution of departments in the hospital, many people are confused, how can so many departments hang?Not to mention the basic medical and surgical departments, even the heart can be divided into many departments.

In the face of this situation, as a patient or a family member, I am really confused. Today, I'm going to talk to you about how to avoid misdiagnosis by doctors

01, high threshold - a major feature of the medical field

To be honest, many people may not even be able to distinguish the names and locations of organs in their bodies, and self-judgment of disease symptoms is a very complicated matter. For example, many people describe a stomachache, this thing can really cross many departments, so many organs in the stomach, any problem can lead to this symptom, not to mention, even if there are many doctors in a department, each of them is different. Of course, the simpler strategy is to consult the front desk, which is now the standard configuration of many hospitals, and the front desk service will give us a relatively accurate department, and then go to **.

So every time I go to the hospital, it is estimated that people can feel that the threshold for medical treatment is really high. Yes, this is a major feature of the medical field, that is, the threshold is high, a qualified doctor has to be trained for at least 8 years, and in reality it will even take longer, and medical students have to complete extremely difficult knowledge learning during this period, just like the textbooks issued by someone to build up, which can be called a lot of sweat.

Eventually, a qualified doctor was born, and they had an aura of "professionalism" on them. It's also one of our favorite words to praise doctors a lot of times.

Sometimes, however, a profession can also present a new problem: limitations.

02, Specialization and limitations?

The process of talent growth is often the result of constantly narrowing one's own field and constantly deepening into the subdivided field, and the advantage of this process is that they are very familiar with the field they focus on and even reach the frontier. But the shortcomings are often obvious, that is, jumping out of their own field, they may become less professional, and even, they are too attached to their profession, so that they have a feeling that everything is a nail with a hammer in their hands, and the result is misdiagnosis or missed diagnosis.

For example, I recently saw a case where a patient was admitted to the hospital because of fever and rash, during which he experienced many misdiagnoses such as tuberculosis and advanced malignant lymphoma, and ran back and forth in multiple departments such as infection, immunity, and blood, and was finally diagnosed with **Still's disease. During this period, other health problems were caused by the use of drugs.

In fact, Tian Xin's story estimates that many people have had a similar experience, that is, after going to the hospital, they went to the designated department, and the result was according to the doctor's diagnosis.

It feels like we and the doctor are trying to make mistakes, trying to hope for a good fortune and then succeed in getting the right medicine.

03, the trap of "professionalism".

But that's not right!Although we admit that modern medicine still has many shortcomings, it cannot be attributed to medical problems, in fact, in many cases, it is more of a misallocation of resources. In a situation like Tian Xin's, it cannot be blamed on the doctor's lack of skills, but because he fell into the trap of "professionalism" from the beginning, because the doctor was too professional and limited the disease to his own field, so they judged according to their own cognition, which led to misdiagnosis.

So, how to solve this kind of problem?

It is best to avoid falling into the "professional trap" at the beginning, and let's take a look at the solutions of other hospitals that have done well.

For example, Mayo Clinic (Mayo Clinic), a hospital that has long dominated the medical rankings, has been a mecca for many doctors, ranking first in the national hospital evaluation for seven consecutive years. In the latest rankings, Mayo Clinic topped 14 specialty rankings and won five of them.

The existence of such a top hospital must have a very good set of solutions, and the core of their solutions is MDT multidisciplinary consultation.

04, What is MDT?

What is MDT?This is an abbreviation for multidisciplinary team, which means multidisciplinary team, which is very popular today, just like people like to look at innovation such as interdisciplinarity. Of course, in medicine, it is called multidisciplinary joint consultation, simply put, it means that two or more experts from related disciplines form an expert team, and then give a consultation opinion for a certain disease, and even carry out diagnosis and treatment on a regular basis and at a fixed point.

The advantages of this model are very clear.

The most direct is to avoid misdiagnosis and missed diagnosis and solve the problem of "professional trap". As we said earlier, it is easy to preconceive too professionally, and as a result, the patient's other indications are ignored, so it becomes a "blind man touching the elephant" to a certain extent. However, MDT multidisciplinary consultation is designed to avoid this, and experts from different professional fields come together to brainstorm and avoid missing or misdiagnosis directly from the source.

Secondly, it can be better evaluated and **. Each patient is different, there is no one-size-fits-all program, multidisciplinary people conduct a comprehensive assessment of the patient, so that a more comprehensive comprehensive research and judgment can be made, and a personalized program suitable for the patient can be formulated.

In addition, this kind of ** plan is also an advantage for the patients themselves, that is, they can avoid repeated medical treatment or running back and forth between different departments and different opinions as much as possible, wasting time and energy.

Some people may say, isn't this what we often call a consultation?

Yes, we have this system as well, especially in emergency care, but it is often an emergency.

05, what we need at the moment

For example, in the United Kingdom, France and other countries, the MDT model has become an important part of the medical system, and the NCCN in the United States has also issued relevant MDT diagnosis and treatment standards. As early as 2010, China began to advocate the development of MDT in the field of malignant tumors.

However, the reality is still difficult. Because our core problem at present is still the shortage of medical resources and the allocation of medical resources.

On the one hand, although a large number of medical students enter the medical industry every year, compared with such a large number of people and patients in China, medical resources are still far from sufficient. On the other hand, the implementation of medical classification is also a practical problem, a large number of people regardless of the severity of the disease are flocking to the top three or even the best hospitals, while ordinary hospitals are cold, this congestion, so that the doctors in large hospitals are not busy at all, and it is even more difficult to implement the MDT model.

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