The story of John Gordon, published in The Washington Post on September 27, was a classic problem lurking in the medical practice. He had undergone 2 knee surgeries, dozens of therapy sessions, acupuncture, and other treatments for wrong diagnosis by several orthopedists and oncologists, including a rare cancer.
Specialists missed, nurse solved the puzzling ailment, figuring out its Lyme disease. The knee problem, which persisted more than a year and cost Gordon unnecessary spending, was over in just two weeks.
Errors in diagnosis usually surface because physicians fail to do basic tests. Lyme disease, a bacterial infection caused by deer tick bite, only needed blood test. But because medical practitioners, including some specialists, easily jump to a more complicated conclusion, patients are not given the right treatment they needed.
This problem persists from when medicine was established until this very modern day. Could it be that such errors are a practice? Something preventable, but preventive measures were simply not applied. Standardized checklists for basic procedures must be widely used. This should minimize the chance doctors would make bad judgments. And if teamwork is better practiced among health care workers, everyone gets to speak their minds freely, laying different points that should lead to correct diagnosis and treatment procedures.
Just as how physicians, nurses, and pharmacists differ with preference in nursing scrubs, their opinion could also differ variedly, allowing the right one to be easily pin pointed. Whether one wears Cherokee uniforms, Dickies scrubs, Urbane scrubs or whatever type, his or her opinions should matter. This also tells that nurses and others must be allowed to challenge their superiors when they are right and be given protection for their action as necessary.
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