All physicians make occasional diagnostic errors, but learning more about how the brain makes these errors can help prevent them, wrote Dan Meyer, MD, a retired professor of emergency medicine at the Albany (N.Y.) Medical College, in an op-ed for AAMCNews.
Four cognitive shortcuts that cause diagnostic errors, according to Dr. Meyer:
1. Premature closure.
This shortcut occurs when clinicians think they see a pattern for a specific illness before confirming the symptoms match that diagnosis. Premature closure usually happens when clinicians "anchor" to a diagnosis and fail to change their mind, even when presented with conflicting information.
2. The representative heuristic.
Sometimes a clinician believes a patient's symptoms match those of one disease, when another, similar disease is the correct one.
3. The availability heuristic.
This shortcut describes the tendency to diagnose patients with a condition that is already on a clinician's mind, perhaps (for example) because another patient came in recently with that diagnosis.
4. Stereotyping.
Clinicians may stereotype patients based on their demographic information or health history. It can be easy to assume that a younger, athletic patient did not have a stroke, for example.