“Failure to thrive” or failure to look?
Geriatrics is a field of investigation. To solve medical puzzles, doctors must become detectives, identifying the effects of overlapping causes that include chronic conditions, acute injuries, social factors, and the normal aging process. It is a challenge that tests the patience of many doctors; the number of board-certified geriatricians in the United States, now just over 7,000, has been decreasing since 2017.By masquerading as a diagnosis, the term "growth failure" shortens the investigative process, stopping the investigation before doctors can determine the true cause, said Dr. Clara Tsui, a geriatrician at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last month, she saw the label in the medical records of an 82-year-old man with Alzheimer's who had fallen and hit ...