PHILADELPHIA — Misdiagnosis is responsible for the deaths of 40,000 to 80,000 individuals in all of medicine each year, according to a speaker here.
“The stuff that we miss are the easy things,” Tamara R. Fountain, MD, said during the Richard A. Ellis Lecture at the Wills Eye Conference. “We miss them not because we don’t know about them — we miss them because we don’t look for them.”
Fountain said that the diagnoses most commonly missed by ophthalmologists are retinal detachment, glaucoma and intraocular foreign bodies.
“When we are missing