“I never met her — pathologists rarely meet their patients — so, I do not know if she was told that her doctors, both the clinician and pathologist, had missed earlier signs of her cancer. We, the doctors, did not talk to each other about the missed diagnosis.
Doctors wear an impenetrable mask of supreme confidence and of always being right. Admitting a mistake is an admission of failure. Discussing one is worse still. Everyone would know that I had made a mistake. I might get sued, causing me both potential financial and professional harm. And so, I kept quiet. In so doing, I may have even caused more harm.”
This is very real to me because I experienced this problem repeatedly for several years. I had some vague symptoms that were slowly getting worse, to the point where they were interfering in my everyday life, and I would see doctors who tell me that they couldn’t find anything wrong so I was either fine or iron-deficient. I was finally, finally, diagnosed with a rare bacterial infection after I used my Harvard.edu email address to worm my way into an appointment with a specialist.
I don’t blame my doctors for not being able to diagnose me - it’s a weird thing that had only had one documented human case by the time I first noticed symptoms - but I am frustrated by the fact that none of them said “I don’t know. The tools that I have are not enough to tell you what is going on. It would be a reasonable choice for you to go and ask someone else.”
Because they didn’t do this, I spent years, years, feeling like a hypochondriac and ignoring my symptoms. I leaned more and more on self-hatred to motivate me though my life plans: everyone is tired, everyone gets back and joint pain, everyone gets headaches, you’re just being weird about it. Until it got really bad, I didn’t bother telling friends and family about it for the most part; I was ashamed. And when I finally committed to believing myself and finding a solution, I found that I didn’t know how to describe my symptoms or how long I’d had them because I never talked about them.
It takes a lot to decide that you know better than your doctor, and it’s really scary on the other side. But when you can’t admit that you don’t know something, the only other answer is “nothing is happening. Your experiences are a lie.”
Related: medicine bias killing women (add https://thenib.com/medicine-s-women-problem)
FB: “A lot rests on that diagnosis, and the doctor takes full responsibility for it. And the good doctor does not get that diagnosis wrong, ever. Because that is what we believe defines being a good doctor. And so, as doctors, we convince ourselves that we do not make diagnostic errors. When we simply cannot overlook the fact that we did make a diagnostic error, we feel intense guilt and shamefully hide the error. We most certainly do not discuss them, or report them, or log them.”
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