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When I was in practice in Denver, a Family Physician won a
court case by insisting that his diagnosis was his alone, and that the
diagnosis did not exist until he made it. --- Lawyers like this kind of
thinking. --- The doctor claimed that the same pattern of symptoms and
complaints could be called many things, but as the patient’s physician, only he
and the patient were privy to those complaints and, therefore, whatever
diagnosis the doc assigned to that condition was
intrinsically correct. It was his diagnosis. He owned it, and it was his means
of classifying this complex of clinical findings.
Interestingly, a similar assignment of diagnosis takes place
in the clinical pathological conference, (CPC). The summary will refer to the clinicians’
diagnosis, the surgeon’s diagnosis, the Radiologist’s diagnosis or the pathologist’s
diagnosis. Such is the ambiguity of the clinical findings in difficult cases.
In the later, the pathologist’s autopsy findings generally win out.
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