9 Mistakes That Can Lead to a Misdiagnosis in the ER

You don’t give a succinct, accurate summary of your symptoms

An ER doctor doesn’t have the time to listen to all your health problems from the time you were born. They have a waiting room packed with patients and often not enough doctors to go around; don’t encourage them to rush to a potential misdiagnosis by keeping your health history short and sweet. “Patients have to understand that doctors need a simple, fairly straightforward summary of the sequence of events that happened to them,” says David Newman-Toker, MD, PhD, Director of the Division of Neuro-Visual & Vestibular Disorders at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. Simply tell them what brought you to the ER, and be as precise and chronological as possible in your description. Doctors confess other ways patients can screw up in the ER.

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