Sometimes things go just the way you want them to, and sometimes they don’t.
Compare and contrast the case of two different patients, and how things went trying to get them the care they needed.
The first patient, let’s call him Mr. Smith, called up one day last week with a brand-new symptom, which after a phone call was ultimately determined to be disturbing enough that he was offered a same-day appointment.
After coming in that same day, he was interviewed and examined, and no definitive diagnosis could be made at the time of the office visit.
As often happens, the wide differential diagnosis of possible things that could be going on with him led to some clinical uncertainty, and a desire to get more testing.
The differential diagnosis included some things very benign, some things not so benign, and some things quite deadly.
A number of diagnostic imaging tests were ordered, with the hopes that as we proceeded serially through these, we would quickly be able to rule in or rule out some of the more worrisome possibilities.
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