Things Your Doctor May Not Know

Before surviving a heart attack, I was what you might consider a model patient. I was always  cooperative, deferential  and polite, with few if any health issues to worry my doctors. Physicians have the letters M.D. after their names, and know all about medicine. I had no reason to ever doubt them.

But all that pretty much changed forever after I was misdiagnosed with indigestion in the middle of a heart attack – despite presenting to the Emergency Department with textbook symptoms like chest pain, nausea, sweating and pain radiating down my left arm.  

The doc who completely missed my heart attack that day in Emerg was a pleasant enough middle-aged man who told me in his confident doctorly tone that not only did I NOT have heart problems, but he could tell just by looking at me that I was clearly in the “right demographic” for having acid reflux. But before he sent me home from hospital that day (feeling truly embarrassed for having made a fuss over nothing!), one of his E.R. nurses had already cautioned me: “He is a very good doctor” and “He does not like to be questioned!”  - this stern warning after I’d had the temerity to actually ask him out loud about this acid reflux diagnosis:

“But Doctor, what about this pain radiating down my left arm?”

Turns out that being misdiagnosed and sent home in mid-heart attack like this is, tragically, not uncommon for women. According to research reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, in fact, women under the age of 55 are seven times more likely to be misdiagnosed during a cardiac event compared to our male counterparts.

And when the American Heart Association surveyed physicians in 2005 to find out how many of them were aware of the fact that more women than men die of cardiovascular disease every year, only 8% of family physicians knew it.

Even more appalling, only 17% of cardiologists were aware of this.  (Cardiologists!  This is their business. This is all they do!)

As cardiologist Dr. Tracy Stevens of Kansas City points out:

“Physicians are still practicing medicine based on cardiac studies performed mostly on white, middle-aged men.”

Dr. Stevens’ observation got me thinking about what other facts our docs may not yet be aware of, and about how that ignorance has to be affecting the way they practice medicine. After all, the British Medical Journal once estimated that doctors have to carry an astonishing two million facts in their heads to help them diagnose illness and keep track of treatment options.

Who can keep two million facts straight? Never mind updated . . .

Sometimes what your doctor doesn’t know can have painful ramifications.  We know, for example, that up to 40% of medical malpractice lawsuits are for something called “failure to diagnose”.

Read the rest of this article on The Ethical Nag: Marketing Ethics for the Easily Swayed.