The Cognitive Autopsy

Recently, it has become clear that medical error is a leading cause of death, and one of the biggest problems occurs when doctors get the diagnosis wrong. Typically, patients may feel that their diagnosis was delayed or wrong because the doctor didn't know enough about their disease, but many studies now show that the problem is more likely to be a failure in how doctors think rather than in what they don't know. This book offers some insight into how doctors think. It identifies a number of biases in medical decision making that are largely responsible for diagnoses being delayed or missed.