Last week, I serendipitously discovered within hours of one another, Jerome Groopman’s How Doctors Think,1 which focuses on the reasons doctors misdiagnose a significant number of their patients and, because of a comment she made to a post on this blog,2 the story of Trisha Torrey, who was the victim of a misdiagnosis of potentially catastrophic proportions.3
Trisha Torrey’s medical misadventure is fascinating - as well as scary - reading that complements Groopman’s book. That narrative can be found at
~Who is Trisha?~
Ms. Torrey’s misdiagnosis and her subsequent course led to her current career as a patient advocate and the creation of her advocacy web sites at ~EPA Websites~ and her blog at ~Every Patient’s Advocate~
While Ms. Torrey’s inclusion here is primarily the result of the fit between her medical history and Groopman’s book, I also believe that patient advocates could play an important role in improving adherence by helping, as Groopman suggests, patients understand how their doctors operate.
Footnotes
- See Helping Patients Help Their Doctors↩
- The comment referred to my March 12, 2007 post, Coaching Patient Compliance↩
- Her comment had no direct connection to her history of being misdiagnosed↩
1 response so far ↓
1 cervantes // Mar 22, 2007 at 8:13 am
Thought I’d return the favor! As it happens, I went into surgery some years back thinking I was going to have my appendix removed, and woke up 8 hours later without my ascending colon. The surgeons had found a lesion on the cecum which they presumed to be a carcinoma, and they had gone ahead and done a right hemicolectomy, only to get back from pathology that I had a diverticulum. Various adventures ensued. I believe this experience — more the aftermath than the misdiagnosis per se — helped steer me toward medical sociology and some of the particular problems I now study.
Anyway, glad to find your blog, I’ll give you a link.