Why Doctors Must Think Like Sherlock Holmes

A 57-year-old woman, receiving physiotherapy for an injured ankle, suddenly suffered a seizure, became unconscious, and was rushed to Emergency. The obvious diagnosis, a sudden stroke. But as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the English doctor and writer who created the fictional private detective, Sherlock Holmes, wrote, “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.” A report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal shows that Doyle was right. Doctors must sometimes think like Sherlock Holmes. The ultimate diagnosis was not a stroke. Rather, a complication from the triple A disease, abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA).