Today an x-ray confirmed a 2nd fracture which was not diagnosed at the time of the injury. That makes one in a thoracic vertebra and one in the hip ball joint.

At the time of this hip fracture (guessing about 13 yrs ago) I was off work for two weeks of bed rest. I wonder what they would have recommended if they had known about the fracture?

Dad was all let's get an attorney (but there is no proving when it happened and there must be a statute of limitations anyway). I was just angry thinking about all the doctors who claimed I had a low threshold for pain. So I guess we are both venting.

Does anyone else have this experience of bones fractured and the docs don't catch it? This doc says it is tricky to see the thoracic one but the hip one is easy, and he was surprised I didn't know.

Due to osteoporosis I've had lots of fractures, and not all of them were diagnosed immediately.

On 2 separate occassions I've broken my sacrum; once horizontally and the other time diagonally. The sacrum is a rather large bone but neither fracture showed on XRay. It was only when my pain persisted that my doctor sent me for a scan, and both times the breaks were diagnosed from the films.

Another time an initial XRay showed one broken rib, but a follow-up XRay showed I'd actually broken 4. At the moment I'm in a plaster cast with 2 broken bones in one arm, and I'm fairly convinced the base of my thumb is broken as well, even though it didn't show on XRay.

So to answer your question, I doubt that it's common but yes ...... fractures can go undiagnosed, and had I not been so persistant in getting my pain reassessed at the time, some of my fractures might not have been picked up either.