Diagnostic errors are a significant concern in the United States healthcare system. These errors, which include misdiagnoses and delayed diagnoses, can have severe consequences, including death or permanent disability.
According to a leading study published in BMJ Quality and Safety, medical misdiagnosis leads to death or permanent disability for nearly 800,000 Americans per year. This total includes an estimated 371,000 people who die and another 424,000 patients who are permanently disabled because doctors misdiagnosed them with the wrong condition.
The most difficult-to-diagnose illnesses
These five conditions are the source of the most frequent misdiagnoses:
- Stroke
- Sepsis
- Pneumonia
- Lung cancer
- Pulmonary thromboembolism
These conditions account for more than one-third of all cases of death and permanent disability. Overall, medical providers misdiagnose diseases about 11% of the time. Some diseases are missed at low rates, whereas doctors miss others more than half the time. For instance, only 1.5% of heart attacks involve misdiagnosis, while they misdiagnose 62% of spinal abscesses.
Why results vary
The high rate of misdiagnosis for certain conditions often involves these factors:
Atypical symptoms: Some people only show atypical symptoms, which can unfortunately get misdiagnosed as a different, often benign, condition.
Misinterpreting the signs: This also contributes to a high rate of misdiagnoses. For example, strokes are often misdiagnosed because some people only show dizziness and vertigo as symptoms of stroke, which can get misdiagnosed as inner ear disease.
Does this sound familiar?
Doctors are human and make errors. Ideally, these are small and quickly addressed. Still, this is only sometimes the case, so diagnostic errors remain a significant issue in the United States, affecting hundreds of thousands of patients each year.
Whether they don’t accurately diagnose the disease, or misinterpret atypical symptoms, medical professionals can be held accountable for their actions by filing a medical malpractice lawsuit. Victims and their families often see the best results when working with a personal injury attorney with experience handling these cases. It’s also important to note that attorneys are paid on contingency, which means they are paid only if they win the case.