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People who look chronically ill may not actually have poor health, according to a new study.

Doctors are taught that a physical examination is not complete without an assessment of whether a patient looks acutely or chronically ill. However, new research reveals that how a patient appears may not actually help diagnose their actual health.

"Doctors sometimes assume that they can tell at a glance whether a patient is in poor health, but it's important for physicians to realize that these impressions may be inaccurate," lead researcher Dr. Shail Rawal said in a news release.

"Our findings suggest that despite its traditional role in the physical examination, a physician's assessment that a patient appears to be chronically ill has limited value in the detection of poor health status," Rawal added.

The latest study involved doctors looking at photographs of patients who visited five of St. Michael's Hospital's primary care or general internal medicine clinics.

The general internal medicine physicians and residents were asked to look at the photographs and to answer yes or no to whether patients looked chronically ill.

The findings revealed that doctors identified that a patient was chronically ill in only 45.5 percent of the time.

Furthermore, only 12 out of 126 patients were rated as "appearing chronically ill" by the majority of physicians, suggesting that there was very little consensus amongst doctors on what that description means.

Researchers noted that the latest study used patient data from a previous study that found looking older does not necessarily mean poor health. Previous studies revealed that a person needed to look at least a decade older than their actual age before it can be assumed that they have poor health.

The findings were published in the journal PLoS ONE.