Medical Diagnosis and Diagnostic Procedures
- Medical diagnosis is the process of determining which disease or condition explains a person's symptoms and signs.
- Diagnosis is often challenging because many signs and symptoms are nonspecific.
- A diagnostic procedure allows for classification of an individual's condition into distinct categories.
- General components of a diagnostic procedure include data gathering, physical examination, and diagnostic tests.
- Processing of the gathered information may involve consultations with other providers and specialists.
- Differential diagnosis and medical algorithms are commonly used methods in a diagnostic procedure.
- A diagnostic test is any medical test performed to aid in the diagnosis or detection of disease.
- Differential diagnosis involves finding possible diseases or conditions that can cause the signs or symptoms.
- Medical tests and further processing are used to eliminate or rank the probability of each candidate condition.
- The resultant diagnostic opinion may be a diagnosis of exclusion or a list of possible conditions.
- Further medical tests, such as medical imaging, may be performed to confirm or disprove the diagnosis.
- Pattern recognition is a method where the provider uses experience to recognize a pattern of clinical characteristics.
- It is mainly based on certain symptoms or signs being associated with certain diseases or conditions.
- This method is used in cases where diseases are obvious or when a diagnosis cannot be made.
- Recognizing a certain pattern of signs or symptoms can lead to a certain therapy, but carries the risk of missing a different diagnosis.
- Diagnostic criteria are the specific combination of signs, symptoms, and test results used by clinicians to determine a diagnosis.
- Diagnostic criteria help standardize the process of diagnosis and ensure consistency in medical practice.
- Different diseases and conditions may have their own specific diagnostic criteria.
Clinical Decision Support System
- Interactive computer programs designed to assist health professionals with decision-making tasks.
- Clinician interacts with the software to make better analysis of patient data.
- System makes suggestions for the clinician to review and select useful information.
- Some programs replace the clinician, requiring regulatory approval.
- Augmented Intelligence systems support but do not replace the clinician.
Adverse Effects and Overdiagnosis
- Diagnosis problems account for 35% of medical malpractice payments.
- Diagnosis errors are the dominant cause of medical malpractice payments.
- Diagnostic errors can lead to economic waste and harm from unnecessary treatments.
- Diagnosis errors occur in at least one in a person's lifetime.
- Diagnosis errors can be caused by various factors such as manifestation of disease or rare conditions.
- Overdiagnosis is the diagnosis of disease that will never cause symptoms or death.
- Overdiagnosis turns people into patients unnecessarily.
- Overdiagnosis can lead to economic waste and treatments that may cause harm.
- Correct diagnosis may be irrelevant if treatment is not available or not needed.
- Overdiagnosis occurs when a disease is diagnosed correctly but the diagnosis is irrelevant.
Errors in Diagnosis
- Most people will experience at least one diagnostic error in their lifetime.
- Causes and factors of error in diagnosis include unnoticed disease manifestations.
- Errors can occur when a disease is omitted from consideration.
- Errors can occur when too much significance is given to a specific aspect of the diagnosis.
- Rare diseases with symptoms suggestive of many other conditions can lead to errors.
Historical Perspectives on Diagnosis
- Edwin Smith Papyrus
- Ancient Near Eastern and Graeco-Roman Medicine
- Medicine in China
- Hippocrates and the history of diagnosis
- Evolution of diagnostic methods.
Medical diagnosis (abbreviated Dx, Dx, or Ds) is the process of determining which disease or condition explains a person's symptoms and signs. It is most often referred to as diagnosis with the medical context being implicit. The information required for diagnosis is typically collected from a history and physical examination of the person seeking medical care. Often, one or more diagnostic procedures, such as medical tests, are also done during the process. Sometimes the posthumous diagnosis is considered a kind of medical diagnosis.
Diagnosis is often challenging because many signs and symptoms are nonspecific. For example, redness of the skin (erythema), by itself, is a sign of many disorders and thus does not tell the healthcare professional what is wrong. Thus differential diagnosis, in which several possible explanations are compared and contrasted, must be performed. This involves the correlation of various pieces of information followed by the recognition and differentiation of patterns. Occasionally the process is made easy by a sign or symptom (or a group of several) that is pathognomonic.
Diagnosis is a major component of the procedure of a doctor's visit. From the point of view of statistics, the diagnostic procedure involves classification tests.
