Make sure you act as your own best health advocate
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ER Nurses Know This. Patients Don’t.
When it comes to your medical care, you are the ultimate authority.Not the doctors, not Big Pharma, and certainly not the Emergency Room. I’m not saying not to go see doctors, use emergency rooms, or take their meds. All of those things can be useful and helpful.
What I am saying is that mistakes can and DO happen, and they happen with surprising frequency.
That’s why it’s so important to advocate for yourself!
According to a study in JAMA there are a terrifying 7 million diagnosing errors in emergency rooms EVERY single year.WHAT?
7 million is an awful lot of people.
To be completely fair, some of this problem comes from the nature of emergency rooms.
People come in with symptoms and nurses have to “triage” or make decisions quickly about when people receive care based on the severity of their symptoms.
“Triage is utilized in the healthcare community to categorize patients based on the severity of their injuries and, by extension, the order in which multiple patients require care and monitoring.”
In this situation it can be tough for both doctors and nurses to get a correct diagnosis 100% of the time. And that’s reflected in the data.
“Overall diagnostic accuracy in the emergency department (ED) is high, but some patients receive an incorrect diagnosis (~5.7%). Some of these patients suffer an adverse event because of the incorrect diagnosis (~2.0%), and some of these adverse events are serious (~0.3%). This translates to about 1 in 18 ED patients receiving an incorrect diagnosis, 1 in 50 suffering an adverse event, and 1 in 350 suffering permanent disability or death. These rates are comparable to those seen in primary care and hospital inpatient care.
You have a much higher chance of being misdiagnosed in the ER (about 1 in 18) vs. winning the Powerball (1 in 292,201,338).And yet we generally give ER doctors complete trust over what’s happening to our bodies!
In fact, 50 people die on average per emergency department each year because of diagnostic errors.“We estimate that among 130 million emergency department (ED) visits per year in the United States that 7.4 million (5.7%) patients are misdiagnosed, 2.6 million (2.0%) suffer an adverse event as a result, and about 370,000 (0.3%) suffer serious harms from diagnostic error. Put in terms of an average ED with 25,000 visits annually and average diagnostic performance, each year this would be over 1,400 diagnostic errors, 500 diagnostic adverse events, and 75 serious harms, including 50 deaths per ED.”
To me, 50 people dying on average per emergency department per year due to preventable mistakes seems like a pretty large number.
I believe that the best way to mitigate the risk of having an ER misdiagnosis is to stay healthy enough that you don’t have to go to the ER.
I realize that ER visits aren’t always preventable.
Sometimes, you have an accident or a health condition and have to go see an ER doctor. That’s OK.
But if you take charge of your own health and work to heal your body and prevent diseases from happening then you can usually prevent many ER visits just by being healthy.
Our culture likes to pretend that doctors are something close to gods, but they’re human just like the rest of us and just as prone to making mistakes.
It’s important to keep that in mind when seeking medical care of any kind.
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