[Sources of error in clinical practice]

The clinical setting is everything that contact us with the patient's reality, including physical, instrumental and laboratory exploration, and we use it for diagnostic and treatment purposes. Diagnosis is the synthesis by which physicians conclude an elaborated analysis of subjective and objective data, obtained by physical exam and technology. This procedure involves data collection about the patient and his disease, the results of various tests and laboratory findings, the interpretation of the data and a diagnostic summary. Medical errors may be derived from insufficiency in any of these phases. It is evident that technology will never replace the intellectual data recollection, analysis and reasoning that is the physician's art. This contribution underlines some of the defects frequently observed in clinical practice that may cause medical errors.