Why do doctors have difficulty diagnosing meningitis?!
Question: because doctors are practicing professionals and not god.
Answers: because doctors are practicing professionals and not god.
Because it happens so fast
Because the symptoms mimic colds, flu, muscle injury to the neck. Doctors do not instantly jump to the meningitis conclusion when someone presents with fevers and muscle aches and sore neck. These are all symptoms of influenza.
Can be viral or bacterial. Bacterial will show up in tests, viral not, making the latter more difficult to diagnose.
because usually to find out indefinitely if you have it, they have to obtain spinal fluid which hurts extremely EXTREMELY bad for the patient...im sure they would rather use that and rule out other things before they just jump to that conclusion.
Maybe because the symptoms of this diseases are similar to the symptoms of others. My cousing died last year, she had streptococus (something like that) in her brain, it was an infection or fungus. But at the end, they said that maybe she had meningitis. It was terrible.
i had viral meningitis about 3 years ago. the symptoms are the same as a migraine, but you will have stiffness in the neck when you try to touch your chin to your chest (It'll hurt). Then they generally do a spinal tap and send it off to be analyzed....it SUCKED!!!!
The symptoms can be very misleading. A friend of mine contracted a very severe case of bacterial meningitis last spring, and when she was taken to the emergency room, she was violent and disoriented. She was taken in by her twin sister, who she could not identify, and kept trying to bite. The staff in the ER were convinced that she was coming down off of heroin, and refused to treat her, instead notifying the police. It was only after a period of time, and a closer examination that they determined that she had meningitis. She stayed in the ICU for nearly a week, was very confused and didn't make much sense. From what it sounds like to me, the symptoms are somewhat ambiguous in that they resemble other conditions or affectations. Her condition was very sever, but my understanding is that in the onset, the symptoms are very easily interpreted as being flu-like, and many people just assume it to be as such.