What makes a doctor a good doctor? Personally, I believe that what makes a good doctor depends on their ability to give diagnostics and treatment to the patient in the most accurate way. And I do not mean that to just doctors, but also psychologists, researchers, and counselors as well. But health and medicine isn’t that simple of placing patients with disorders and diseases like a matching game. It isn’t that uncommon for people to mislabel people with having a certain disorder or vice versa, and that is called a judgmental error. Even professionals make those mistakes, and some of these mistakes are critical for that person’s well-being.
I have quite a lot of these experiences of being labeled with the wrong disorders, and sometimes I never even had one in the first place. The first time that happened was in kindergarten, when teachers thought I had some mental disability. They thought I had some disability because I was obsessively crying and terrified while at kindergarten, which the true reason was, I didn’t understand anything of what people were saying, due to the fact I was not a native English speaker. After that, there were other incidents that had me or others getting falsely assumed to have a mental problem, thinking about it right now. I remember a friend of mine being called down to the guidance counselor’s office for blasting System of a Down’s “Chop Suey” during class, accused of having suicidal thoughts. I was recommended for therapy with a social worker when I wrote poetry inspired by dark themed lyrics of Vocaloid songs during middle school English class. Of course, there are some adequate reasons behind the teachers thinking that we are mentally going the wrong path, but what kinds of music we listen to and our attitudes doesn’t always correlate to the mental state. After all, teachers are not mental health specialists, so they shouldn’t have taken their students’ interests too seriously.
What I have been talking about was teachers falsely judging students about mental health, so let’s get back to the topic of doctors. Even before learning about false judgements in clinical decision making, I knew such thing existed since middle school. In seventh grade, I had a long period that I was out of school, due to unstoppable coughing. I went to the pediatrician in town and was told that the cause of the coughing is psychological stress, and he will send a letter of recommendation to see a psychologist. I couldn’t think of what was stressing me out, but in fact the stress was in the fact that the doctor isn’t giving me medication. After two more attempts, I was diagnosed with bronchitis after the pediatrician finally send a referral to a larger hospital and found traces of bronchitis in my lungs after a quick scan. At that time my coughing was almost gone, and I still think that this was avoidable if the pediatrician gave me an inhaler in the first place.
My case was in general health, but clinical judgement can be wrong, even in professionals. In my scenario, there were two misjudgments by the pediatrician. The first misjudgment is a false-negative, which is defined as “not recognizing a bona fide problem that exists” (Gruman et al. 118). For my case, this applies to the fact that I was diagnosed to have a psychological issue like general anxiety disorder, which was inferred to be the cause of my coughing. The other misjudgment is the false-negative, or “when a diagnostic label is inappropriately given to a client” (Gruman et al. 118). This applies to the fact that I wasn’t diagnosed with bronchitis, which led to my suffering for unnecessary long time. The two failed diagnoses resulted in myself suffering twice the amount, and the proper treatment wasn’t given until I was already done with the hard part. Although the false-positive and false-negative is part of a psychological clinical judgment model, it is certainly fitting in non-psychological health issues as well.
If doctors even make mistakes in evaluating their patients, I think us nonprofessionals shouldn’t be inferring people to have health problems. Without the competence and knowledge, it is more likely for us to make false assumptions, and when those assumptions become actual words, we might cause unnecessary harm to the person.
Gruman, Jamie A., et al. Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems. SAGE, 2017.