Stories of mis-diagnoses in the media

Psychosomatic nonsense strikes again:

 

I actually know someone in the UK with a young relative who is experiencing the same thing. Doctors said the child's symptoms were due to them suffering from stress due to exams but it turns out the hospital missed the brain tumour on the MRI.

The child’s current state is now dire. The doctor who told the parents it was stress apparently apologised saying they missed the tumour on the scan.

The family’s first language isn’t English so I’m told there is a lack of confidence in whether to pursue the matter legally. But things are so bad that pretty much everyone aware of the situation is advising them to try seeking legal advice. It’s not something that an apology alone can suffice.

 

This comes down in part to our all being forced to accept biopsychosocial medical care without out consent. Every appt, brief as they already are, is reduced automatically by two thirds of the time being given to absolute nonsense, either directed verbally at the patient or going on in the doctor’s head. So far in my family, in the last three generations, one person has had endometriosis dismissed for six years before being diagnosed, at considerable cost in pain and lost education, another born with a connective tissue disease was only diagnosed at 22, she had been atrociously medically gaslit for over two decades. Another was told his earache wasnt important for months before they realised it was cancer and by then had already spread too far for him to be saved, and another, mid pregnancy, almost died of sepsis because ‘woman with abdominal pain’ was put down to stress. That and forty years of medical gaslighting over ME/CFS doctors had better start looking at how to start rebuilding shattered trust. No wonder nobody wants to work for the NHS, its made itself ridiculous.

 

indeed, that drivel about "mirroring" her mothers backache made me feel sick, poor, poor girl. I hope lessons will be learned, and perhaps they will, by the main Drs involved, but the wider profession will likely just um & ah & go on doing the same thing.

I'm so very sorry to hear this, its appalling.

 

Such appalling, and very sad situations!

And, the gaslighting fans out to relatives and friends of the individuals in question. Either for seeking medical help for their loved one, or in trying to get help for their own medical issues.

 

I can’t even dismiss it as incompetence or malice on behalf of the individual doctor. The whole system is literally geared to funnel patients into the psychosomatic scam - hordes of therapists, apps, self-help books.

 

Do you think you might stumble across web archive versions of this article somewhere?

 

It wants me to pay up and subscribe, I won’t remember to unsubscribe so I am not keen.

 

Still paywalled unfortunately

 

https://archive.is/tbVHx

 

Going back to the content @JohnTheJack, this is such a horrific and yet familiar story isn’t it, an organisation of some kind very powerful like a large corporation or a state body, inflicts massive harms then adds insult or rather years of physical and mental torture as part of a system to cover up the damage and avoid the responsibility for preventing harm or making reparations.

 

How many times does this have to happen before something gets done about it? There are millions of documented cases of harm inflicted by a hasty diagnosis of acronym syndrome. Most of it is simply dismissed as inconsequential, doubling down on the initial harm, but there is plenty that isn't. There are many recorded deaths from treatable issues that were caught too late.

And not only does it give almost no one in the profession any cause for concern, this practice keeps expanding. There is never any acknowledgement of this in the psychosomatic literature, they keep on pretending that such things don't happen anymore. Just as they always have.

Making the same mistake over and over again is no longer a mistake. When it's done by professionals, it's dereliction of duty. When it's done on this scale, it's criminal negligence.

 

Merged thread

I knew there was something wrong but doctors kept misdiagnosing me

I knew there was something wrong but doctors kept misdiagnosing me (msn.com)

 

Worth a read. She also describes the support she gets now as amazing - I think this is mainly due to the MS trust as she cited one GP after her diagnosis said silly thing ‘you don’t look like you have MS’

you never know whether to take with a pinch of salt because support varies on individual situations etc but the support seems like a world away

yet we’ve seen the odd inkling on here if the BPS still sometimes wanting to drag MS in to psychosomatic even now.

And how the system even now there are pathways are focused in the UK on preventing access to diagnostics to ensure that no-man’s land where people are abused on that excuse (no proof you are ill, not going to investigate in any serious way to see if you are) is maintained so it’s circular

why are people so darn abusive and why is abuse being taught as if it is ‘the new psychology’ in the form of BPS and Chalders crap false belief ‘take away their rights and voice’ campaign that she built a kingdom on

and I have to ask the question about the set up re patients and organising that means MS is in such a different place vs ME:CFS and whether there is anything we can learn

 

This is what it really means to say that MS used to be considered psychosomatic until MRIs. Confirmed cases probably mostly weren't, although for sure a lot of patients were told a bunch of nonsense anyway, but until the tools to confirm cases were commonplace, the vast majority of cases were missed, psychologized, with no way of knowing how many real cases there were.

It still happens, with no excuse for it, so going back X decades means more missed cases, growing along with X the further you go back in time. At some point it was probably 99%, even now most cases involve lengthy delays because the tools are inadequate, the imaging has to be done when lesions can be seen by them, and they must not be missed in the process.

It is fundamentally different than saying nonsense like "ME doesn't exist", but the outcome is exactly the same in the end. The latter is far more incompetent, but there is no real difference in outcomes, in harm done, and in how much scientific progress is delayed. "You don't have this because I can't confirm it" is the exact same thing whether no cases can be confirmed, or only some can.

This is one frustrating thing with all of this, that even once all this malignant nightmare is over for us, there will be no way of knowing exactly how many lives were thrown away, how much real harm was done, how much needless suffering was caused by medicine's ineptitude in dealing with the limits of its knowledge, people ostracized, rejected from their own friends and families because of a system so dysfunctional it can't even acknowledge that it can possibly be dysfunctional at all. Because almost none of it is properly recorded, with no way of looking back to reassess. It's mass graves where the only difference is that the victims suffered longer before they got buried.