This morning, when I checked the room, I saw that the complaints kept appearing on the medical record: “cough for 4 months”, “cough for 6 months, aggravated with shortness of breath for half a month”, “recurrent cough and sputum for 2 years, aggravated with fever for 1 month “. I see it in my eyes and pain in my heart. Do you know what this means? These 3 patients have all been diagnosed with pulmonary TB in Ward 4 of the TB Department of our hospital, and 2 of them also have combined bronchial TB at the same time. That means they have been misdiagnosed for 4 months, 6 months and 2 years respectively! Isn’t it a bit too much, too exaggerated? But this is the harsh truth, and it is happening all around us. As a tuberculosis doctor, I have experienced and witnessed too many such cases, often with long delays and many twists and turns before they are diagnosed. Why does this happen over and over again? What can be done to reduce the number of misdiagnoses and too-long delays? Why are there truths that seem so simple to me that patients and other doctors don’t know? I often feel that the power of a doctor is limited, and that I can only help my patients if they come to me, but that is only a very limited number of patients, a drop in the ocean. How can I help more patients, as the Buddhist saying goes, “to help all sentient beings”? I found that the lack of general medical knowledge and medical knowledge of our nationals, the urgent need to improve the professional level of primary care doctors, and the disparity in the level of hospitals at all levels are the main reasons for the current situation. Therefore, as Mr. Lu Xun said, doctors should “shout” loudly to wake up the public, and must strengthen the popularization of science, so that the people can awaken themselves to know what to do and how to choose to seek medical treatment; on the other hand, to strengthen the continuing medical education for doctors, so that primary doctors can improve their professional level. This is a remedy for the persistent problem of misdiagnosis. Next, I would like to talk about my specialty: early diagnosis and treatment of lung diseases, especially tuberculosis. Of course, patients are unlikely to diagnose themselves with TB; all they know is that they are coughing, or have a fever or something, so I’ll start with the patient’s symptoms. It’s a ridiculous misconception that many patients refer to a cough as a “cold”, but it’s widely circulated. In fact, anyone with medical knowledge knows that there are many causes of coughing, and almost all respiratory diseases can cause coughing, with colds being one of the more common ones. If the cough is not cured for a long time, or if it coughs again soon after it is cured, the cough must not be a common cold. It must be taken seriously enough. For patients with cough for more than 2 weeks, I have summarized a few tricks to reduce misdiagnosis: 1. A chest X-ray must be taken, and if the chest X-ray is not definitive, a chest CT must be taken. 2. A chest X-ray or CT must be repeated after anti-inflammatory treatment to determine whether the lung lesions have disappeared, regardless of whether the cough improves. This is because sometimes the cough will improve or disappear even after antibiotics are used for tuberculosis, but the lung lesions will not disappear. 3.Bronchoscopy is very important for patients whose diagnosis is not clear from routine examination. 4.If there is pleural fluid, we must try to draw pleural fluid for laboratory test to help the diagnosis. 5.If the diagnosis cannot be confirmed by the primary hospital, it is necessary to go to the higher level hospital; if the general hospital cannot solve the problem, it is necessary to go to the specialist hospital; if the outpatient clinic cannot solve the problem, it is necessary to be hospitalized. Do not hang on a tree. To make use of the medical resources of a good big hospital. You can check the information of hospitals online to choose the right hospital to go to, but it is not advocated to diagnose yourself according to the symptoms of the disease online, because after all, ordinary people are not doctors, it is impossible to become a doctor through the Internet. All you need to do is to choose the right hospital and doctor, and leave the rest of the puzzle to the doctor.