Patients Don't Need Quick Diagnoses. They Need Accurate Ones.

The patient knocking on your door is not your enemy. They’re sick. They’re scared. They’re in pain. They don’t know why, and they’re hoping for an answer. If you can’t find the source of a problem quickly, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. 

It seemed like an innocuous tweet. It was just a doctor, somewhere on Twitter, declaring that it was important to learn to quickly ascertain if patients were “sick or not sick.” It was sentence; perhaps two. It spoke volumes.

He was not suggesting that doctors needed to learn to quickly assess severity; to triage for treatment priority; to know when to send a patient to a specialist. Nope. It was “sick or not sick.”