From Alternet:
The Startling Truth About Doctors and Diagnostic Errors

Despite all of the talk about medical errors and patient safety, almost no one likes to talk about diagnostic errors. Yet doctors misdiagnose patients more often than we would like to think. Sometimes they diagnose patients with illnesses they don't have. Other times, the true condition is missed. All in all, diagnostic errors account for 17 percent of adverse events in hospitals, according to the Harvard Medical Practice Study, a landmark study that looks at medical errors.

Traditionally, these errors have not received much attention from researchers or the public. This is understandable. Thinking about missed diagnosis and wrong diagnosis makes everyone -- patients as well as doctors -- queasy. Especially because there is no obvious solution. But this past weekend the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) made a brave effort to spotlight the problem, holding its first-ever "Diagnostic Error in Medicine" conference.

Hats off to Bob Wachter, associate chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and the keynote speaker at the conference. Wachter shared some thoughts on diagnostic errors through his blog Wachter's World. read