Chapter 8: Specialists Have Blind Spots.
How To Avoid Being Harmed By Them.
My son slept in the chair next to me as I presented his long list of symptoms to his third neurologist. “It began with sudden onset of physical and verbal tics when he was seven,” I started, adding ever more unusual symptoms, some that stayed and some that flared like a falling star, appearing and disappearing seemingly randomly.
“That’s quite a list,” the neurologist replied. “These are of interest to me,” he continued choosing two-thirds of them. Later in the appointment, I asked him about the ones he left out. “Oh, those aren’t my area of expertise. They’re not relevant.”
But he was wrong. They were relevant and my son nearly died. All his symptoms were connected to one medical condition with one cause that he missed — as did a dozen others — because he was hyperfocused on pieces of my son rather than all of him.
There’s little you can do to broaden their thinking beyond asking, “What else this can be?”
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