How long can you have something undiagnosed before it's negligence?

[Jonette]

Just wondering how much leeway medical professionals have?
As in if you've had something for years, when is anyone going to ever ask the question of the doctor(s) 'Eh, why didn't you notice that?'

Or is the onus on you as a patient to google symptoms and then pursue doctors?

I guess it depends on whether you've drawn the doctor's attention to all of your symptoms. He/ she isn't a mind reader . Asking why they didn't notice , assumes that you've told them all your signs and symptoms and asked for them to investigate. Then they have to have received all the relevant results from various tests, x rays etc, and to have been able to form an opinion on the meaning of all those tests.

Diagnosing a disease is like doing a very difficult puzzle - if the doctor doesn't have all the puzzle pieces , they may not be able to make a correct diagnosis.

The fact that you have Googled your ideas and come to your own conclusion, doesn't mean that you are correct and that the doctor is wrong.

Negligence would mean that the doctor knew what was wrong with you but failed to give you proper care. If they don't know what's wrong with you, you can't then accuse them of negligence.

But say you don't know what are 'symptoms' as such?

Should a GP or A&E doctor not be able to spot something? Without you having to bloody google for yourself and come up with possible diagnoses?

I hear it all the time 'luckily my doctor noticed such and such'.

Eh no - that's their job.

Drs aren't miracle workers, though it does sometimes feel like it for some people. I don't think you can expect a doctor to be aware you are ill if you've never mentioned a symptom or given him/her cause to investigate.

Somethings never get diagnosed despite doctors trying their hardest. Somethings never get diagnosed because doctors are not able to realise that a mole they haven't seen for three years now looks different and their patient wasn't aware of it either. some things aren't diagnosed because the tests don't give quite the readings that would normally alert a doctor.

There are so many reasons why something might not be diagnosed and only a few of them will be any form of malpractice.

I am not sure this is going to answer your question, but I was sure I had rapid cycling bipolar through googling.

I built up so much evidence, such as mood diaries. Turned out I do have bipolar but the medication I was on was making the cycles much worse.

I had been arguing for years with various medical people to try and get myself help, I don't think anything I suffered was neglict, it is just tough sometimes.

some people are really awful historians and have no clue what should be mentioned. pulling teeth would be easier than pulling information from these medically naive people.
yes having visited your uncle in africa is important. yes your new diet craze of drinking gallons of fermented mushroom juice is relevant.
why op what do you think was missed?

If you do not know what the symptoms are as such, then a diagnosis would be even harder to make, especially in the the little time allocated to each patient.

Doctors can only work with the information they are given, so if they don’t know about a symptom because they haven’t been told about it and it’s not immediately visibly obvious, they won’t be considered negligent for not making a diagnosis on the basis of that symptom.

The test for medical negligence is whether no other professional of reasonable skill and competence would have behaved the way the doctor in question did. So if they follow normal practice or an established course of action they will not be considered negligent, even if it means they miss making a diagnosis.

Dd has coeliac disease and it was a long time before anyone put two and two together and that person was actually me.

But we'd been back and forward to the doctors with all the symptoms, chronic anaemia, low vit d, constant tummy ache, being sick most days. She was prescribed iron but no thought as to why she might be anemic, stomach pains were put down to anxiety/growth pains. One doctor said she must be allergic to oestrogen as she was on the pill - I had to point out she was on a progesterone only pill.

Apparantly average time from reporting symptoms to diagnosis is 13 years!

Drs are only human. I feel grateful and that other people have completed that difficult training and can try and help me if I'm critically ill. I'm sure there are a few that aren't very good at their job (as with every sector I guess) but the vast majority work extremely hard to help people. There also isn't endless resources for everybody.

You do have to put the doctor in a position where they could reasonably make a diagnosis. So if you never see them, or go for your blood pressure checked but never mention your crippling abdominal pain, bloody diarrhoea or whatever it is, of course they aren’t negligent for not being psychic.

Equally if they ask about something and you tell them a load of rubbish (because you “don’t know what a symptom is” wtf) that isn’t negligence, they can only go on what you tell them. You can’t sue somebody because you told them one thing and they should have known you were lying and assumed the opposite.

Few more details might get you more helpful answers, OP.

yanbu
drs train for years and years and it's reasonable to expect them to be able to interpret symptoms and to know when/if to refer on to more specialised drs/nurses/therapists.

but sadly, with little time at a gp consultation and a dismissive culture of gp's asking 'what do you want me to do about it...' (FFS)
that's not happening enough

But OP is saying her GP should be able to “spot” that she has asthma or Crohns or cancer or whatever it is she’s googled that she’s got, without her needing to mention it to anyone. Not even remotely reasonable.

By negligence do you mean you wish to pursue a claim for compensation, you want a particular Dr investigated for poor practice or you want to make a complaint?

To make a complaint I'd start with Pals, or whatever the new name is.

If you want to try and get compensation you need to prove that the medical services missed something they should have spotted and that this affected your health significantly. You could see one of the many solicitors that work in that field.

With any of these options you'd need to be a lot more forthcoming than you've been on here.

• but not everyone can google and get a reliable result.

• many people are not well educated and don't know what 'symptom' means.

• I would absolutely expect a gp to link symptoms (like stomach pain and anaemia as above) and refer for appropriate tests

8 years my diagnosis was missed for because nobody looked at my numerous blood tests as a graph/together rather than individually

I have known a couple of cases where legal action was taken for medical negligence, when doctors failed to refer patients on, with devastating consequences.

In each case, the patient had presented repeatedly with specific symptoms and eventually saw another doctor who immediately made the connection and referred them- only to find that a great deal of damage had occurred during the wait.

YABU
There are so many of the same symptoms associated with various different illnesses and diseases so it’s not always clear what someone is suffering with. It relies on further investigations and it is also helpful if people could identify their symptoms.

My DM's (fortunately benign) brain tumour was missed for 14 months due to dismissing symptoms as "her age", not following the correct protocol and some shear incompetence (loosing hospital notes). If the symptoms are presented with reasonable clarity and protocol followed then it's NOT AT ALL unreasonable to expect a doctor to reach a correct diagnosis WITHIN a reasonable timeframe.

YABU
Incredibly subjective, if you're a terrible historian then it makes it more difficult.

If you're going in with vague symptoms then it can be very difficult.
What is it you think you have? If it's migraines then yes, the symptoms are often classic (but not always). If it's a rarely seen autoimmune disease then it'll take time.
It's not bloody Lyme disease is it OP? It's the fashionable diagnosis for any random symptom you can come up with

More context needed from OP

The thing is, doctors can only go with what you tell them (and in some ways with what they see).
If you dint tell them about the lump in your groin, they are unlikely to magically know about it. If you do tell them and they dismiss it, then it’s a different picture.

Re people being bad ‘historian’, actually this is the doctor job to ensure they have the right information. The issue here is that it can be very hard to do in 5 mins with a GP. So not so much as negligence as a major issue with the system itself.
One thing I found helps is to make a list of symptoms and check it with symptoms from the NHS website (even for simple things such as tonsillitis) because there are symptoms I would never think about mentioning that actually are part of the picture.

Naughty Lyme disease is a VERY serious illness and I hope you will never get it. Because if it’s not treated right at the start it can really wreck your life :(. It’s certainly not just a ‘fashion’ and is very probably under diagnosed in the U.K.

doctors can only go with what you tell them

^^yes, but:

Re people being bad ‘historian’, actually this is the doctor job to ensure they have the right information.

absolutely.
it's not the gp's job to send the patient away with instructions to take 2 paracetamol and come back in 2 weeks...

I knew someone who googled her symptoms and thought she had IBS, sadly she had cancer and has died. Go to the doctor and tell him all the symptoms