Sprains, Strains and Growing Pains: Managing Cognitive Bias to Facilitate Timely Diagnosis in Pediatric Sports Medicine

Early recognition of cognitive biases, including confirmation bias, anchoring bias, and ascertainment bias, is crucial for improving medical decision making, particularly in cases of rare or atypical presentations, reducing unnecessary diagnostic delays, and setting more realistic patient expectations. Through discussion of these cases, we highlight concrete steps to manage bias to facilitate timely diagnosis within the primary care and sports medicine setting.