When a patient shows up to a doctor’s office that patient is not thinking that a doctor is just going to “guess” the diagnosis. If this is done and the doctor is wrong, the patient can suffer serious injury, or even death.
To prevent “guess work” from happening, doctors are supposed to use a differential diagnosis to help then find the right diagnosis for a patient’s symptoms. How this works using a basic analysis is that the doctor is supposed to review the patient’s charts and listen to the patient’s complaints. From here the doctor is then supposed to list out the possible diagnoses which can be associated with these complaints, with the most serious first. Next the doctor is supposed to perform tests or other procedures to rule out or confirm the diagnosis.
In the above video, the doctor did not even perform an exam on the patient. The doctor just concluded that the patient was “suffering from the flu” because the flu was “going around.” It seems no type of differential diagnosis was even performed. As a result, the doctor’s “guess” was not correct and the patient suffered a ruptured appendix.
If you think that your doctor has not been listening to your complaints, and because of this you have been the victim of medical malpractice, this is what we invite you to do. Pick up the phone and give us a call. We can be reached at 301-850-4832. We answer legal questions like yours regarding Maryland medical malpractice law all the time and we would be glad to listen to your story.
