What An Autopsy Looks Like -- And Why You Need One
NPR and ProPublica yesterday ran a fine story on why we need autopsies – but, alas, do them only rarely. These post-mortems corrected tens of thousands of wrong or partial diagnoses, taught doctors and hospitals invaluable lessons, and helped revealed both trends in misdiagnosis and new diseases ranging from Legionnaires disease to West Nile virus. In the NPR/ProPublica story, for instance, an autopsy revealed that an otherwise mysterious death was due to a pulmonary embolism -- and that the embolism was in turn caused by widespread cancer in a woman who was thought healthy. And seven years ago, I wrote "Buried Answers," a New York Times Magazine feature, that explored at greater length much of the same information that is in the excellent NPR/Propublica story. From "Buried Answers," New York Times Magazine, 24 April 2005: Recently I stood in the autopsy room of a large teaching hospital waiting for a body to be brought up from the morgue.
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