Misdiagnosis of Heart Disease
Help! I think I’ve been misdiagnosed.
Having heart disease symptoms is a real burden, but the added emotional stress of having people, especially doctors, refuse to take your concerns seriously can almost be too much to bear. The good news is that many women have been in your shoes before and were eventually able to receive the treatment they needed. While it may be frustrating that some doctors don’t take women’s concerns seriously, know that there are doctors who are sensitive to the special problems of heart disease in women and ways to increase the chances that a doctor will listen. It is a sad fact that some women are still misdiagnosed, and sometimes you must be willing to fight to get the care you need.
The only way to reduce the rate of heart disease misdiagnosis in women is to increase the awareness of this problem in healthcare providers and in women themselves. Doctors need to know how widespread heart disease in women is, how to recognize women’s symptoms, and how to use the right tests to make a diagnosis; women need to know their own risk and what they can do to make sure they receive the right diagnosis.
This article will tell you how and why misdiagnosis happens, how to prevent it, and what to do if you think you’ve been misdiagnosed.
What exactly is misdiagnosis?
Misdiagnosis is one type of medical error. Misdiagnosis can range from a complete failure to diagnose (totally missing a disease) to wrong diagnosis (for example, diagnosing anxiety instead of a heart attack) to a partial misdiagnosis (for example, diagnosing the wrong subtype of heart disease or the wrong cause of the disease or its complications). A related medical error is delayed diagnosis, which is when a doctor does not recognize a disease until long after it should have been identified.
How common is misdiagnosis?
Misdiagnosis rates are different for different diseases and exact numbers are hard to come by, but a poll commissioned by the National Patient Safety Foundation found that one in six people had experienced a medical error related to misdiagnosis.1 Women (especially younger women) with heart disease are more likely than men to be misdiagnosed. One of the few available studies of heart disease misdiagnosis looked at more than 10,000 patients (48% women) who went to the emergency room with chest pain or other heart attack symptoms. The investigators found that 1 in every 50 people who had suffered a heart attack were misdiagnosed and sent away from the hospital. Women younger than 55 were seven times more likely to be misdiagnosed than men of the same age. The consequences of this were enormous: being sent away from the hospital doubled the chances of dying.2
Next: Why Does Misdiagnosis Happen?
