Breaking: Doctor Defaults To Most Serious Diagnosis

The Doctor of a Patient who presented with a case of mild neck pain and upper limb paraesthesia has been assured that her symptoms are quite alarming.

“Well I don’t want to alarm you, but you should be fucken alarmed!”, explained Dr Arma Dingbat. “I’m 99% certain your mild neck ache and arm tingling is from an incurable degenerative neurological disorder. Unless I’m wrong of course, in which case it’s got to be stage IV cancer, a raging infection or a mystery flesh eating virus. But rest assured… I’m nearly never wrong”.

Dr Dingbat continued with a careful explanation of how best to go about getting to the root cause of the Patient’s symptoms.

“So I’ll tell you how we are going to tackle this. We are going to assume the worst case scenario, and carry out an array of diagnostic tests inline with that assumption. But don’t worry, the tests will be quite expensive, and will likely cause you a great deal of anxiety. And probably a bit of discomfort too. If we can rule out the worst case scenario, we will move onto the next most frightening differential diagnosis., and we will investigate it to the point of exclusion. Again, you should feel assured that although these additional tests could be categorised as non-essential, they will be costly and painful… and they probably won’t provide us with a definitive answer.

The good news is that once we’ve ruled all these nasty pathologies out, we can be confident that you’ve got nothing serious to worry about, and we can send you on your way safe with the knowledge that your problem is product of your high BMI and / or must be psychosomatic”.