Differential diagnosis is a tool doctors use to determine the cause of your illness. They rule out diseases until the cause of your ailment is found. Differential diagnosis, if used properly, can help prevent a missed diagnosis, as well as misdiagnosing a patient with a disease they don’t have.
How does a doctor use the differential diagnosis tool?
Your doctor should use differential diagnosis like a detective. The doctor uses your signs and symptoms like clues. The doctor should factor in your test results and h/her medical knowledge to help decipher those clues. With these in mind, the doctor should create a list of all the possible diagnoses that could medically explain what is causing your symptoms.
A prudent doctor should put the most life-threatening causes at the top of the list. One by one, the doctor should narrow the list, ruling out the most life-threatening causes first. One by one, causes will be eliminated by finding clues that don’t fit. This process of elimination is differential diagnosis.
Be a part of the process?
It's important for you to know the other diagnosis options, and why they were eliminated. By understanding why your doctor eliminated a cause, you can understand if that cause really should have been erased. For example, did the doctor miss one of your symptoms or were your records mixed up with another patient’s. Being part of the process can help ensure that you are correctly diagnosed.
Listen carefully to why the other diagnoses were eliminated. It could be that the signs and symptoms used to discard a diagnosis are wrong. By reviewing the evidence with your doctor, you'll be verifying that the correct evidence was used in determining your diagnosis.
Misdiagnosis happens more than we would like to believe. Some experts put the rate of misdiagnosis or missed diagnosis at 40%.
Misdiagnosis and Missed Diagnosis
If you aren’t getting better, or the prescribed treatment isn’t helping, you may want to ask the doctor to revisit the differential diagnosis process. You may have been misdiagnosed, or the proper diagnosis may have been missed altogether.
Misdiagnosis – this describes the situation where your doctor diagnosis you, but the diagnosis is incorrect. For example, a doctor might diagnose heartburn, instead of a heart attack.
Missed diagnosis - this describes the lack of a diagnosis, usually leading to no or inaccurate treatment. An example would be when a woman is told the small lump in her breast is benign, only to learn later that it is cancer that has gone untreated.
Misdiagnosis and miss diagnosis can lead to dire consequences. Without the proper treatment, a patient’s condition can worsen causing disability and even death. Often, the only way to learn of improper diagnosis is to stay on top of your care and in the event of death, request an autopsy.
If you or a loved one have been misdiagnosed by a doctor who failed to use the differential diagnosis tool, Chelsie King Garza can help. Ms. Garza is an experienced Houston medical malpractice attorney who is familiar with differential diagnosis and its proper use.
