In clinical practice, we often encounter patients complaining about why the test reports (imaging, test orders and other special tests) from other hospitals are not recognized and have to be done again when they change hospitals. Some patients suspect that the doctor is trying to get a commission for prescribing more tests, but our doctors are often wronged, because on the one hand, they are fined for overspending on health insurance due to indiscriminate prescribing of tests, and on the other hand, they really need to do tests again. Disease is dynamic: First of all, we all know that disease is dynamic. The reports provided by the patient may be 10 days or even months old and do not reflect the current state of the disease. For some acute conditions, important changes may occur in as little as an hour. Sometimes it’s not so much a matter of disagreeing with an outside hospital report, but rather disagreeing with a report from too long ago (this too long may be as short as a few hours). What the patient thinks is different from what the doctor wants Sometimes a patient will come in with an ultrasound report from another hospital that has found a thyroid or breast nodule. In this case, the receiving physician will probably ask the patient for a Doppler sequence (ultrasound) because of the importance of the blood flow signal in determining the benignity or malignancy of the mass. Considering that Doppler ultrasound actually counts as ultrasound, the patient may mistakenly ask for a repeat of the exact same test. Or a cancer patient who has a general CT in a primary hospital finds a highly suspected cancer lesion and is advised to go to a higher level hospital for consultation. However, the diagnostic significance of ordinary CT for cancer is rather limited, and often enhanced CT is needed to provide richer information and combine with blood cancer indicators for reference. However, some patients may not be clear about the significance of enhanced CT and mistakenly think that doctors ask for repeat examinations. Even sometimes when they go to a higher level hospital, patients are asked to do MRI because the CT and MRI machines do look a little bit alike, and some patients therefore mistakenly think that the two examinations are exactly the same. The same test done at different hospitals may also have different results. In the case of MRI, for example, both Philips and Siemens products work very well, and the high magnetic field models produce clear images. However, there are some differences between different brands of instruments in terms of clarity, signal values of individual sequences, etc. Therefore, many departments with high requirements for fine local anatomy, such as spine surgery and joint surgery, often require clinicians to read the films themselves, and these doctors have worked in one hospital for a long time and tend to be more accustomed to the films of their own hospital. In addition, CT and MRI are actually multi-layer scans, and a single test may involve scanning hundreds of planes, while the actual print on the film may only be a few dozen, and many different levels of detail are lost as a result. Therefore, having the patient retake one may be a way for the doctor to open the electronic version from his own hospital imaging system so that the local area can be viewed in a magnified manner and specific parameters can be easily measured, and unclear areas can be carefully talked about by a phone call to a colleague in the imaging department, all of which are intended to better help clarify the clinical diagnosis. I hope this article can help patients to further understand the intention of doctors to “repeat the examination”, and not to take a detour in the process of seeking medical treatment and not to spend money in vain. At the same time, as medical workers themselves, they should also take the initiative to avoid over-examination and over-medication, to be able to afford the trust of patients. After all, trust is hard to build, but collapse only takes a moment.