(The Atlantic) – “I appreciate the designation but sort of reject it, only because of my own philosophical stance, which is that it’s very hard to master the diagnostic process,” Dhaliwal told me when I talked with him for my book about diagnosis. He considers himself a student of diagnosis, committed to getting better. “To me, the concept of the master diagnostician is that you’re never good enough.”

That belief puts Dhaliwal on one side of a core question of medicine: Are some doctors inherently better diagnosticians than others, or is diagnostic excellence a skill that any clinician can achieve? Doctors usually get it right—some estimates suggest about 90 percent of the time. But with roughly 1 billion physician-office visits each year in America, even a low error rate can still affect a large number of  people. A 2023 study estimated that 371,000 people die a year and 424,000 are disabled following a misdiagnosis. (Read More)