Doctors make mistakes. And they make them more frequently than you might think.

That’s the finding of a new study published in this month’s Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. The researchers surveyed more than a thousand pediatricians—community pediatricians, academic pediatricians, and pediatricians in training—and found that 54 percent of them reported making a diagnostic error at least once or twice a month.

It’s not quite as bad as it sounds. Trainees made the most errors, and they are supervised—so more experienced doctors are poised to catch the errors before anything bad happens. …