Brief discussion: How to avoid misdiagnosis by doctors?

I believe that the first question many people encounter when seeing a doctor is: which department to go to. Looking at the densely packed departments in the hospital, many people are confused. How can they go to so many departments? Not to mention the basics of internal medicine and surgery, even a heart can be divided into many departments...

Faced with this situation, patients or family members are really confused. Today, let's talk about how to avoid misdiagnosis by doctors?

01. High threshold - a major feature of the medical field

To be honest, many people cannot even distinguish the names and locations of organs in the body, and self-diagnosis of disease symptoms is a very complicated matter. For example, the stomach pain described by many people can really span many departments. There are so many organs in the stomach, and any problem can cause this symptom, not to mention that even in one department there are many doctors, each with different expertise. Of course, a simpler strategy is to consult the front desk, which is also the standard configuration of many hospitals now. The front desk service will give us a relatively accurate department, and then go for treatment.

So every time I go to the hospital, I can probably feel that the threshold for medical care is really high. Yes, this is a major feature of the medical field, that is, the threshold is high. It takes at least 8 years to train a qualified doctor, and in reality it may even take longer. During this period, medical students have to complete extremely arduous knowledge learning, just like the textbooks issued by someone are piled up, which can be called a pile of books.

Finally, a qualified doctor is born, and they carry the aura of "professionalism". This is also one of the words we like to praise doctors the most.

However, sometimes, expertise may also bring a new problem, that is: limitations.

02. Professionalism and limitations?

The process of talent growth is often the result of continuously narrowing one's own field and deepening into sub-fields. The advantage of this process is that one is very familiar with the field in which one is focused, and even reaches the forefront. However, the disadvantage is also often obvious, that is, if one jumps out of one's own field, one may become less professional. In fact, they are so obsessed with their own profession that they feel like they are holding a hammer and seeing everything as a nail, which results in misdiagnosis or missed diagnosis.

For example, I recently saw a case where a patient was admitted to the hospital for fever and rash. During this period, he experienced many misdiagnoses such as tuberculosis and advanced malignant lymphoma. He ran back and forth between multiple departments such as infection, immunity, and blood, and was finally diagnosed with adult Still's disease. During this period, other health problems were caused by medication.

In fact, many people probably have had similar experiences to Tian Xin's story, that is, they go to the designated department of the hospital and receive treatment according to the doctor's diagnosis. If the effect is not good, many people may not choose to change the medicine, but to directly change hospitals and doctors. After all, in the minds of many people, they have silently given this doctor a bad review.

It feels like both we and the doctors are trying and failing, hoping for a lucky break and a successful cure.

03. The Trap of “Professionalism”

But this is not right! Although we admit that modern medicine still has many shortcomings, we cannot attribute everything to medical problems. In fact, in many cases, it is more about the mismatch of resources. Cases like Tian Xin's cannot be blamed on the doctor's lack of skills, but because they fell into the "professional" trap from the beginning. Because the doctors are too professional, they limit the disease to their own field, so they judge based on their own cognition, resulting in misdiagnosis.

So, how to solve this problem?

It is best to avoid falling into the "professional trap" from the beginning. Let's take a look at the solutions of other hospitals that have done well.

A typical example is Mayo Clinic (Mayo Clinic International), which has long been a top medical hospital and is considered a sacred place by many doctors. It has been ranked first in the US hospital rankings for seven consecutive years. In the latest published specialty rankings, Mayo Clinic International ranked among the top in 14 specialty rankings and won the first place in 5 of them.

The existence of such a top hospital must have an excellent set of solutions, and the core of their solutions is MDT multidisciplinary consultation.

04. What is MDT?

What is MDT? This is the abbreviation of multidisciplinary team, which is very popular nowadays, just like everyone likes to see innovations such as interdisciplinary. Of course, in medicine, it is called multidisciplinary joint consultation. Simply put, it is an expert team of more than two experts in related disciplines, and then give a consultation opinion on a certain disease, and even conduct diagnosis and treatment regularly and at fixed points.

The advantages of this model are very obvious.

The most direct way is to avoid misdiagnosis and missed diagnosis and solve the problem of "professional trap". As we said before, being too professional can easily lead to preconceived ideas, which results in ignoring other indications of the patient, thus becoming a "blind man touching an elephant" to some extent. However, the MDT multidisciplinary consultation avoids this problem from its design. Experts from different professional fields gather together to brainstorm and avoid missed diagnosis or misdiagnosis directly from the source.

Secondly, it can better evaluate and treat. Every patient is different, and there is no one-size-fits-all treatment plan. People from multiple disciplines conduct a comprehensive assessment of the patient, which can enable a more comprehensive and comprehensive assessment and develop a personalized treatment plan suitable for the patient.

In addition, this treatment plan is also an advantage for the patient himself, as it can avoid repeated medical treatment or running back and forth between different departments with different opinions, wasting time and energy.

Some people may say, isn’t this what we often call a consultation?

Yes, we also have such a system, especially in emergency treatment, we may encounter such situations, but these are often emergency situations.

05. What we need now

We need to work hard to expand the scope of application of this excellent system. For example, in countries such as Britain and France, the MDT model has become an important part of the medical system, and the NCCN in the United States has also issued relevant MDT diagnosis and treatment standards. my country also began to promote the implementation of MDT in the field of malignant tumors as early as 2010.

However, the reality is still very difficult, because our current core problem is still the shortage and allocation of medical resources.

On the one hand, although a large number of medical students enter the medical industry every year, compared with the huge population and patients in my country, medical resources are still far from sufficient. On the other hand, the implementation of medical grading is also a practical problem. A large number of people, regardless of the severity of their illness, flock to the top three or even the best hospitals, while ordinary hospitals are deserted. Under this congestion, doctors in large hospitals are simply too busy to handle it, and it is even more difficult to implement the MDT model.