MEDICAL DIAGNOSTIC ERRORS

Reading an article titled The Startling Truth About Doctors and Diagnostic Errors, I realized that more have happened to me that I had really thought about. Having often told patients that they have to keep their own records because doctors die, their office staff makes errors, records can get burned, flooded out or otherwise lost, a patient should also keep a very clear record of which drugs they have taken and what the reaction to them has been. Without that, a new doctor could prescribe the same drug with the same negative effects.

It is not encouraging to a patient who has met a doctor who agreed to take them on as primary care physician to walk into the office with your record in hand and introduce themselves as though they have never seen you before. When that happened to me I tried not to embarrass the doctor too much by explaining that I knew she could not remember all her patients but that we had met a few months before. She was clearly embarrassed (as well she should have been since she obviously had not glanced at the chart). Now this doctor has a small laptop that she carried with her and plugs into the system when she enters the examining room. It is easy to see that she has not looked at my file before entering the room because she does the usual checklist. "Do you still have an inhaler?" I answer, "Yes." "How often do you use it?" I reply, "I have not used it for 8 years." Nothing seems to be changed or noted on the laptop as we breeze onto the next question.

"I see you don't seem to have had your yearly mammogram." I answer, "That's right and I never plan to have another since I was called back last year though my test showed negative, because they had found something in an old record and felt they should check it out. Half or more of the room full of patients were call backs and the mammography unit had just been redone with new equipment. It was bad enough that I was disrespected about the importance of my own time and that my insurance would be billed unnecessarily, I was expected to suck up that reasoning. Actually my old record somehow had erroneously shown that I had a cyst removed. No protestations on my part that I had never had surgery, nor that I showed no scar, were adequate to expunge that from my record.

My thoughts had been triggered by an article I had just read. On an ACE inhibitor which was bringing my blood pressure down too far as I lost some weight, I developed dizziness to the point that I felt at risk driving and suffered when I moved my head up, down, or sideways. I told the doctor that I was dizzy. She corrected me and said I had vertigo. I told her, "Whatever, my gyro is off." She examined my ear; no accumulated wax, no redness, no sign of infection. So she prescribed an industrial strength anti-histamine. From a report from a neighbor who had been on the same medication, I check everybody's brain, Google, and found that vertigo was a side effect of the medicine I had been taking. I stopped taking my low dose of ACE med and the vertigo left me. A few months later when I told my doctor that I had stopped the medication and was feeling fine and checking my blood pressure daily, she insisted she had to see me. Recognizing that she might have felt it necessary as a CYA procedure for herself, I went to see her. Since my insurance does not cover the entire bill, I was annoyed that I had to pay money to her to confirm what I already had proved to myself.

The more I thought of my doctor's office appointments, the more I realized that doctors are body mechanics who often don't take the time (or are given it by their employers) to adequately find the source of a problem accurately.