When Doctors Give Patients A Bad Diagnosis By Telephone
Posted Jun 14 2011 7:38am
I am always outraged when I hear that a doctor has given a patient a potentially fatal diagnosis by telephone. Sometimes doctors even leave such a message on an answer machine! What has happened to sensitivity and compassion in the medical profession?
An old friend called yesterday saying her GYN doctor called to say that instead of the benign tumor she saw in the patient's X-ray that the woman had diffuse cancer in the pelvis! I assumed that the doctor must have been right out of her training to be so insensitive but it turned out that she was in her sixties. I have had mothers of patients with disorders like Duchenne muscular dystrophy tell me that they were given the diagnosis by phone. Often the diagnosis was wrong. One of the worst examples of this bad medical practice was a frantic mother who called me late on a Friday afternoon. I was caring for one of her children in a spina bifida clinic and had never seen the child she called about. This little boy had swollen glands and the doctor had done a blood count. He called late on a Friday to say that the child most lokely had Hodgkins's disease. The symptons sounded like infectious mononucleosis to me. I immediately called an outstanding pediatric cancer specialist and he agreed to see the boy first thing Monday morning. My diagnosis was correct and yet that parents went though a terrible weekend thinking their son had a fatal diagnosis.
I am always outraged when I hear that a doctor has given a patient a potentially fatal diagnosis by telephone. Sometimes doctors even leave such a message on an answer machine! What has happened to sensitivity and compassion in the medical profession?
An old friend called yesterday saying her GYN doctor called to say that instead of the benign tumor she saw in the patient's X-ray that the woman had diffuse cancer in the pelvis! I assumed that the doctor must have been right out of her training to be so insensitive but it turned out that she was in her sixties. I have had mothers of patients with disorders like Duchenne muscular dystrophy tell me that they were given the diagnosis by phone. Often the diagnosis was wrong. One of the worst examples of this bad medical practice was a frantic mother who called me late on a Friday afternoon. I was caring for one of her children in a spina bifida clinic and had never seen the child she called about. This little boy had swollen glands and the doctor had done a blood count. He called late on a Friday to say that the child most lokely had Hodgkins's disease. The symptons sounded like infectious mononucleosis to me. I immediately called an outstanding pediatric cancer specialist and he agreed to see the boy first thing Monday morning. My diagnosis was correct and yet that parents went though a terrible weekend thinking their son had a fatal diagnosis.