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Desaturation during the pandemic: Covid or cognitive bias?

The coronavirus pandemic has put an unprecedented strain on our health care system. An urgent need for timely and accurate diagnosis coupled with an inordinate caseload and myriad overlapping signs and symptoms with other differentials is leaving physicians fatigued. This often leads to the use of m...

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Autores principales: Nangia, Ritika, Sethi, Chetna Arvind, Dhiman, Niharika
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Wolters Kluwer - Medknow 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10041246/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36993068
http://dx.doi.org/10.4103/jfmpc.jfmpc_833_22
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author Nangia, Ritika
Sethi, Chetna Arvind
Dhiman, Niharika
author_facet Nangia, Ritika
Sethi, Chetna Arvind
Dhiman, Niharika
author_sort Nangia, Ritika
collection PubMed
description The coronavirus pandemic has put an unprecedented strain on our health care system. An urgent need for timely and accurate diagnosis coupled with an inordinate caseload and myriad overlapping signs and symptoms with other differentials is leaving physicians fatigued. This often leads to the use of mental shortcuts – “heuristics” by the strained mind and the inadvertent use of intuitive thought processes rather than the more controlled analytical thinking to cope and speed up the decision-making process. Availability bias – making a recent or vivid patient diagnosis more readily accessible to the mind – and anchoring bias – relying too heavily on a single symptom for deducing diagnosis – are among the most prevalent cognitive biases. Therefore, it is not unexpected that any new cases of acute onset respiratory illness may be mis-diagnosed as coronavirus disease 2019 during the pandemic, significantly impacting the morbidity and mortality of true diagnosis. To reduce the risk of patient harm, it is therefore imperative that medical practitioners be aware of the existence and influence of cognitive bias in clinical decision making and maintain sight of a variety of differential diagnoses to ensure that no adverse condition is overlooked.
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spelling pubmed-100412462023-03-28 Desaturation during the pandemic: Covid or cognitive bias? Nangia, Ritika Sethi, Chetna Arvind Dhiman, Niharika J Family Med Prim Care Case Series The coronavirus pandemic has put an unprecedented strain on our health care system. An urgent need for timely and accurate diagnosis coupled with an inordinate caseload and myriad overlapping signs and symptoms with other differentials is leaving physicians fatigued. This often leads to the use of mental shortcuts – “heuristics” by the strained mind and the inadvertent use of intuitive thought processes rather than the more controlled analytical thinking to cope and speed up the decision-making process. Availability bias – making a recent or vivid patient diagnosis more readily accessible to the mind – and anchoring bias – relying too heavily on a single symptom for deducing diagnosis – are among the most prevalent cognitive biases. Therefore, it is not unexpected that any new cases of acute onset respiratory illness may be mis-diagnosed as coronavirus disease 2019 during the pandemic, significantly impacting the morbidity and mortality of true diagnosis. To reduce the risk of patient harm, it is therefore imperative that medical practitioners be aware of the existence and influence of cognitive bias in clinical decision making and maintain sight of a variety of differential diagnoses to ensure that no adverse condition is overlooked. Wolters Kluwer - Medknow 2022-11 2022-12-16 /pmc/articles/PMC10041246/ /pubmed/36993068 http://dx.doi.org/10.4103/jfmpc.jfmpc_833_22 Text en Copyright: © 2022 Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/This is an open access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.
spellingShingle Case Series
Nangia, Ritika
Sethi, Chetna Arvind
Dhiman, Niharika
Desaturation during the pandemic: Covid or cognitive bias?
title Desaturation during the pandemic: Covid or cognitive bias?
title_full Desaturation during the pandemic: Covid or cognitive bias?
title_fullStr Desaturation during the pandemic: Covid or cognitive bias?
title_full_unstemmed Desaturation during the pandemic: Covid or cognitive bias?
title_short Desaturation during the pandemic: Covid or cognitive bias?
title_sort desaturation during the pandemic: covid or cognitive bias?
topic Case Series
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10041246/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36993068
http://dx.doi.org/10.4103/jfmpc.jfmpc_833_22
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