Introduction
During diagnostic reasoning, a clinician attempts to collect, process while also interpreting information obtained from the patient so as to generate an action plan for treatment. However, it is critical that in this process, a clinician may commit some errors that can result in a wrong diagnosis and treatment of the patient. The following section discusses three of these mistakes.
The Illusory Casualty
It is the kind of error that occurs when a clinician tends to develop a bias in finding a causal relationship even in a situation when there is none. It is a powerful bias and occurs when both the clinician and the patient want to have a belief that the medications they order or receive are useful. Most chronic diseases occasionally have flare-ups that get better even with no drugs, but when a clinician wants to get credit for the improvement, this error occurs (Ely, Graber & Croskerry, 2011).
Availability Heuristic
It refers to the tendency if a clinician getting influenced by the diagnosis that he/she had recently, or what often comes to his mind readily (Ely, Graber & Croskerry, 2011). As a result, there might be an over-diagnosis where the physician performs one diagnostic test to several patients or an under-diagnosis when the clinician fails to diagnose an illness in a patient because previous tests were negative (Norman, & Eva, 2010).
Representativeness Heuristic
It arises when a physician the probability that the patient has got an illness when the disease features are many, whereas the baseline probability might be low (van Staden, 2013). Although it is true that if the signs and symptoms of a disease are more in a patient, then the disease is likely present, there might be factors that could overwhelm this assumption (Ely, Graber & Croskerry, 2011).
In conclusion, when conducting a diagnostic test to find out the necessary information from a patient so as to make the right treatment options, various errors can occur. Among them include the availability heuristic, representativeness heuristic, and the illusory casualty.
References
Ely, J. W., Graber, M. L., & Croskerry, P. (2011). Checklists to reduce diagnostic errors. Academic Medicine, 86(3), 307-313.
Norman, G. & Eva, K. (2010). Diagnostic error and clinical reasoning. Medical Education, 44(1), 94-100. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2923.2009.03507.x
van Staden, C. (2013). Examining fallacies in diagnostic reasoning. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 19(3), 528-530. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jep.12052
