Mike
Carruthers:
I'll bet you'd be surprised how often people who are seriously
ill are misdiagnosed by a doctor.
Dr. Laura
Nathanson:
In hospitalized patients who die and who get autopsied - it
happens fifteen percent of the time. And half of those fifteen
percent of deaths would have had a better prognosis if the diagnosis
had been made correctly.
Pediatrician
Dr. Laura Nathanson, author of the book What
You Don't Know Can Kill You.
That's just the
tip of the iceberg because autopsies are few and far between
and most people do not die in the hospital they die elsewhere.
Dr. Nathanson's
husband died after being misdiagnosed and that tragedy has opened
her eyes to this problem. What would she have done if she had
known then what she knows now?
I would have
gotten his medical records right away. I would have seen that
his chest x-ray report was a mess and that you didn't need to
know the meaning of the medical terms or the jargon. All you
had to do was to look at the doctors' attention to detail and
ordinary logic.
Now you may have
thought that you don't actually have access to your medical
records - but you do.
Since April of
2003 there's been a federal law that every American is entitled
to his or her own medical records and to the records of their
children under the age of eighteen, and a spouse or a friend
or a parent who gives written consent.
Tomorrow, what
you need to know if you ever go the hospital - I'm Mike Carruthers
and that's Something You Should Know.
|
