[VOA]

He should have gone back when the toe continued to hurt and/or when
his daughter told him she believed it was infected.

Sadly, I suspect that in the UK/Socialized Medicine regime,
it's hard to tell your current doctor "YOU'RE FIRED!!!" and
get another one before you die.

My favorite example of this was an episode of "Missed Diagnosis"
that appeared on Discovery Channel.
A mother kept taking her feverish, lethargic son back to their
family physician for over a week, each time being told "he'll
get better".

Eventually the fever got so high, the parents took the boy to
the local hospital via the emergency room.
The family physician showed up and tried again to say "take
him home, he'll be OK"...
when the mother screamed to him "YOU'RE FIRED".

Fortunately, the mother stumbled on an attending nurse that gave
her the name of a doc that came in like the cavalry and diagnosed
Kawasaki's disease.
And got antibiotics started immediately as the kid had symptoms
for 10 days...just about the time at which irreversible damage
starts to set in.

The boy made a full recovery.

He might not have been even this lucky in a socialized healthcare system.

[hocndoc]

The lesson from that show wasn’t that the diagnosis was missed - it’s to keep going back if you’re worried, because some things can’t be diagnosed early in the course of the disease.

Kawasaki disease is a syndrome that’s hard to diagnose, and by definition it can’t be diagnosed in less than 5 days and antibiotics don’t help. We use immunoglobulins and high dose aspirin.

http://www.emedicine.com/EMERG/topic811.htm
http://www.aafp.org/afp/990600ap/3093.html

The lesson from that show wasn’t that the diagnosis was missed - it’s to keep going back if you’re worried, because some things can’t be diagnosed early in the course of the disease.