appendicitis does not present in a standard way. reporter: it s been nine months since alice tapper finally got her appendectomy. and after a particularly dark time she is once again allowing herself to start dreaming about the future. but now she has a new mission as well. i want to row in college and maybe study zoology. i just love how my life is turning out. i think that it was a really i wish it never happened to me, obviously. but i think it was a really important learning experience for me. i want other kids to know that they need to advocate for themselves. so sanjay, you re not only a dad, you re a doctor who works at a major hospital. i can tell you firsthand how frustrating this was for me and jennifer. so as a parent when you know something is wrong with your kid how can you really get your doctor s attention if you feel they re not listening and not taking sufficiently seriously what you re telling them?
appendicitis. and yet less than half of all people with appendicitis have the classic pattern. where were you experiencing the pain? i had pain all over my abdomen instead of just my right quadrant. the way that they ruled out appendicitis was a jump test. i was asked to jump, and i was able to maybe get one inch off the ground. and just that ruled out appendicitis for all the doctors. and that s when they just declared it was a viral infection. but reporter: dr. prashan mahajan heads the pediatric emergency medicine department at the university of michigan. he says misdiagnosis can occur in part because of diagnostic momentum. you anchor yourself on that particular diagnosis and it is possible in some instances that it is taking you away from the condition that the patient has. reporter: it was in part that diagnostic momentum that led to the doctors missing the early signs of appendicitis in alice. every year roughly 25,000
us was the fact that the doctors discounted appendicitis based on the kind of test that they had available in the year 1300. they just poked her and v abdomen and then poked the other side. well, she s feeling pain everywhere, therefore it can t be appendicitis. oh, she s able to jump an inch off the ground, therefore it can t be appendicitis. that s not enough. and we know from dr. mahajan s research anywhere from 5 to 15% of the time appendicitis does not present in this standard way. so i think alice s main message is doctors, parents, kids know that appendicitis does not always present in a standard way and doctors, update your standard of care so that you re not just backing into a diagnosis. i can tell you i ve already gotten calls because people knew we were working on this story from heads of big children s hospitals around the country
otherwise. alice and my wife jennifer are now trying to change how doctors rule out appendicitis. we asked cnn s chief medical correspondent dr. sanjay gupta to take a look at what alice went through and how this can be prevented for anyone else. i was so tired. i would sleep through the whole day and my stomach was hurt so bad. i ve never been in that amount of extreme pain before. that was the scariest thing i ve ever seen. because it was just the life was just leaving her. and i just thought this is what is wrong why is her skin so green and why are her hands and feet freezing? i mean, you really thought that alice might die. i absolutely don t like to think that she could have died, but 100% i was starting to think. reporter: jennifer and my colleague jake tapper are 15-year-old alice s parents. they all wanted to share their
yeah. well, first, jake, i want to say that i m sorry. just i saw all that you all that alice and all of you went through. and just as a fellow human i just want to say i m sorry. i read those medical records. there was hundreds of pages. it was hard to believe what i was reading, that sort of nightmare scenario that was unfolding. and i just wanted to say i m so sorry you guys went through that. look, i learned a lot while looking into this, jake. i think one of the things jennifer said near the end, really being the advocate, understanding that parents know their children better than anyone, and really focusing on what tends to be one of the most common reasons for misdiagnosis, which is if symptoms are atypical at all. it tends to throw off maybe the obvious signs in this case of appen appendicitis. there s a new study that came out today showing there s 130 million e.r. visits every year and about 5% to 6% of the time there s a misdiagnosis. 2% of the time it can lead to