5-7 Biases in public health medicine have been well recognised. Anchoring bias is closely related to confirmation bias and comes into play when interpreting evidence. Physicians who exhibited information bias, anchoring effects and representativeness bias, were more likely to make diagnostic errors [38, 43, 46, 50]. Med Decis Making. 8-12 There are a number of ways in which cognitive bias can be seen to play out in the covid-19 pandemic. cognitive bias: a study of decision making and multiple treatment alternatives in medicine. Anchoring bias, limited differential leads to quadriplegia Spinal epidural abscess (SEA) too often overlooked Facts: A 44-year-old male with recent interferon treatment for Hepatitis C and a prior history of neck surgery with hardware sees his PCP for new onset headache, photophobia, and URI symptoms. Anchoring bias can cause a clinician to prematurely settle on a diagnostic hypothesis based on initially gathered information and thereafter downplay alternative diagnostic possibilities. Authority bias Declining to disagree with an "expert." 2006 Mar- Apr;26(2):154-61. ⢠Wegwarth O. Like a medical procedure, heuristics can have both risks and benefits. The senior resident sends you to the medical ward to quickly discharge a 67-year- old patient admitted the day before with COPD. For example, we wrote about a case of anchoring in our November 2008 column , âAnchoring errors ensue when diagnoses get lost in translation,â where a patientâs complaint of gas caused clinicians to initially miss an abdominal aneurysm. ... and Pamela Hartzband are staff physicians at Bostonâs Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Anchoring Bias. Anchoring refers to the tendency to latch on, or anchor, to the first symptom or bit of data, leading to misdiagnosis. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky studied many of the pitfalls of heuristics, such as these: The base-rate neglect fallacy, explored in my previous post , surfaces when we misuse the anchoring and adjusting heuristic. Anchoring bias reflects the undue influence that an initial impression has on the evaluation of subsequently collected information. It refers to physiciansâ practices of prioritizing information and data that support their initial impressions, even when first impressions are wrong. A physician can anchor on a specific aspect of the history, a physical finding or a laboratory result. Further studies are needed to identify what the most common cognitive biases and the most effective strategies to overcome their potential influence of medical tasks and errors. Smart strategies for doctors and doctors-in-training: heuristics in medicine. Discrimination against patients Many types of implicit bias discriminate against patients ( box 1 ). This unconscious bias, also known as implicit bias, is important in a medical setting âbecause it may affect decision making about how care proceeds,â she says. Anchoring refers to the tendency to latch on, or anchor, to the first symptom or bit of data, leading to misdiagnosis. This increasing awareness of bias has resulted in a surge in clinical and psychological research in the area and development of various âdebiasing strategiesâ. Example The hospital you are working in as a medical student is short of beds. Medical Education 2009: 43: 721â 728 Dr. Amori, who holds a doctorate in counselor education and a master's degree in counseling and human systems, says four types of cognitive bias are most common. Cognitive bias is increasingly recognised as an important source of medical error, and is both ubiquitous across clinical practice yet incompletely understood. Cognitive bias has frequently been discussed in general healthcare environments where it may affect both patient care and staff wellbeing, 2-4 and also in science settings. This video explains and illustrates common cognitive biases that affect medical decision-making.