Got a health problem? There’s a 10 per cent chance you don’t have what your doctor has diagnosed

Have you been diagnosed with a chronic ailment, such as diabetes, heart problems, arthritis or even cancer? There’s a 10 per cent chance your doctor has got it wrong – which means you could be taking powerful drugs for no good reason.
Doctors are getting the diagnosis wrong in one out of every 10 cases across a “wide variety of medical conditions”, researchers estimate. As a result, too many patients are receiving expensive treatment for a condition they don’t have, which could include surgery and drugs that also come with serious side effects.
A survey of 122 multiple sclerosis (MS) specialists revealed that they had seen 600 patients who had been misdiagnosed by another doctor with the disease. Virtually all of the patients had started drug therapy for a disease they didn’t have, costing health authorities at least $11 million a year.
One in seven of the specialists said they had not told the patient about the misdiagnosis because of the psychological harm they believed would be caused, they told researchers from Oregon Health & Science University.
They reckon the high level of misdiagnoses across a range of conditions could be reduced if the patient saw a specialist.
(Source: Neurology, 2012; doi: 10.1212/WNL.0b013e318259e1b2).

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