Teeth, gorillas, and inattentional blindness
I don’t like making mistakes. But when I do, it’s important to learn from them so... let’s learn together! We look at radiographs every hour of every working day. So much so that we can lose focus. Take the case of the first radiograph where I missed the mesioden right in the middle. 😱 Thankfully it was caught at a follow-up exam and was treated with no complications.
CC: nothing
Dx: mesioden between #E and #F
Tx: extraction of mesioden
🔑: A lesson in inattentional blindness. Let’s start with an amazing study performed by Harvard researchers. They had radiologists review a series of slides looking for cancerous nodules. Unbeknown to the radiologists, an image of a gorilla (size of a matchbox) was superimposed onto one of the images. The result of the study was 83% of radiologists missed the gorilla! One of the Harvard researchers remarked, “In other words, what we're thinking about — what we're focused on — filters the world around us so aggressively that it literally shapes what we see.“ Going back to my case, you can draw similar parallels. Most of the time, dentists review radiographs to find caries. If we don’t find caries, we move on and in the rare occasion, we miss a pathology. This brings back an important lesson from radiology class in dental school: look at the teeth last! Analyze everything around it first and you will be less likely to fall victim to inattentional blindness.
Tag someone you think will benefit from this lesson below!
