Exposure to media information about a disease can cause doctors to misdiagnose similar-looking clinical cases

Academic Medicine : Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
Henk G SchmidtRemy M J P Rikers

Abstract

Anecdotal evidence indicates that exposure to media-distributed disease information, such as news about an outbreak, can lead physicians to errors; influenced by an availability bias, they misdiagnose patients with similar-looking but different diseases. The authors investigated whether exposure to media-provided disease information causes diagnostic errors and whether reflection (systematic review of findings) counteracts bias. In 2010, 38 internal medicine residents first read the Wikipedia entry about one or another of two diseases (Phase 1). Six hours later, in a seemingly unrelated study, they diagnosed eight clinical cases (Phase 2). Two cases superficially resembled the disease in the Wikipedia entry they had read (bias expected), two cases resembled the other disease they had not read about (bias not expected), and four were filler cases. In Phase 3, they diagnosed the bias-expected cases again, using reflective reasoning. Mean diagnostic accuracy scores (Phase 2; range: 0-1) were significantly lower on bias-expected cases than on bias-not-expected cases (0.56 versus 0.70, P = .016) because participants misdiagnosed cases that looked similar to a Wikipedia description of a disease more often when they had read the Wikip...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jun 4, 2014·Advances in Health Sciences Education : Theory and Practice·Kevin McLaughlinGeoff R Norman
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