Abstract
Consider that diagnoses are attached to patients using a type of “glue”. How much and how sticky depends on many variables. When the Professor of Cardiology auscultates the heart of a patient with chest pain and syncope and pronounces there to be “severe aortic stenosis”, the diagnosis is applied with thick lashings of glue that only a normal aortic valve on ECHO could unstick. When a concerned parent of a child with abdominal pain is reassured by the senior surgeon that “this is certainly not appendicitis”, the glue of that diagnosis is scraped off and it loses momentum.
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Ryan, W. (2021). Diagnostic Momentum Error. In: Raz, M., Pouryahya, P. (eds) Decision Making in Emergency Medicine. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0143-9_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0143-9_19
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