Medical Misdiagnosis & Failure to Diagnose

There are several ways that a medical misdiagnosis can occur. The diagnosis does not specifically have to be wrong; in fact, many diagnoses are correct, but the timing was delayed, causing progression of a disease or a more severe treatment regimen.

See the common types of medical misdiagnosis below:

• Wrong diagnosis – The patient is diagnosed with a condition that they actually do not have. This is often seen when patients are not forthcoming with the entirety of their symptoms, or there is an error in a diagnostic test. Many times, different disease processes have similar symptoms.
• Missed diagnosis – A missed diagnosis is one in which the client receives a clean bill of health when there is indeed something wrong. This is seen often in rare or mild disease processes and can have not only significant physical but also mental effects.
• Retained foreign bodies – Perhaps the most common surgical mistake, a retained foreign body is noted as either an instrument or assistive device that is left in the body when performing surgery. Sponges are notoriously common. To prevent this, strict equipment counts are utilized to ensure that whatever is used during the surgery is also accounted for before the body is closed. Failure to obtain all items used in surgery before closure will result in the need for a second surgery to remove the item.
• Delayed diagnosis – A delayed diagnosis is a diagnosis that is correct, but it did not occur in a timely manner. One of the most common types of misdiagnoses, this is seen often in emergency medicine when face-to-face physician time is minimal, and physicians are not aware of the history of the patient. Common cases include delayed cancer diagnosis and delayed heart attack diagnosis.
• Failure to recognize complications – The physician makes a correct diagnosis but fails to identify other factors which can complicate the disease. For example, a physician may correctly diagnose a mental health illness such as depression, but they fail to ask about or test the patient’s kidney function and prescribe medication with nephrotoxic effects.
• Failure to recognize a related disease – The physician correctly diagnoses one disease but fails to diagnose a related disease that typically accompanies the diagnosed disease. An example would be if an elderly patient is diagnosed with neuropathy, but the physician fails to test for diabetes. Uncontrolled diabetes is known to increase the severity of neuropathy, so that cause must also be treated.
• Failure to recognize an unrelated disease – Same principle as above; one disease is correctly diagnosed, but another, completely unrelated to the first, was evident in diagnostics and not diagnosed.

It is important to recognize that a surgical error can occur at any level of the medical process. For instance, if the laboratory technician mixes up blood samples and reports incorrect information to two different patients, the physician may accurately read the reports that came through, but because they were for the wrong patient, the diagnosis is incorrect. At this point, the lab technician is to blame, not the physician, who was acting on the information they were provided.