Alexandra Sifferlin

So the next person you see may not know your medical history or know that this was something you've complained about for a while.

And so just the way that sometimes care can be a bit isolated and people are not necessarily talking to each other, I think things can get missed and can go for too long unresolved.

Yes, definitely.

And I think, you know, one thing I try to get across in my book is that I am not saying that physicians are bad.

bad at diagnosing, they get it right most of the time.

Estimates suggest that 90% of the time, physicians are getting the diagnosis right.

However, if you have, you know, there's something like 1 billion doctor's office visits a year, 155 million visits to the emergency room a year, that you can quickly see how even a low rate of error can still affect

Thank you so much.

part of improving this is even just recognizing that this is the case.

Often physicians are never made aware of the fact that that person they saw in the emergency room, they actually didn't get the diagnosis right.

They don't get that sort of feedback loop.

And so I do think that there are, everyone is trying, but there are places to improve.

Totally.

Yes.

Or if you were seeing someone for, you know, not just in an emergency room setting, but you saw someone and they came to you, you know, so few people have a primary care doctor these days.

So let's say someone does have an appointment with you.

You suggest a diagnosis, they get the medication or the treatment, but it doesn't resolve.

That person may, instead of going back to you, they may go to somebody else and you never end up hearing that that case was missed.

And I think that's one of the things that American patients especially find so frustrating is how much of it falls on you as the individual to be providing that information and that

backstory and history to every single physician or specialist that you are seeing, or if it's not you, you're going on behalf of a family member, a child, a spouse, or something like that, and having to sort of retell or reprovide information again and again.