Stories of mis-diagnoses in the media

Art Vandelay

Art Vandelay

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Psychosomatic nonsense strikes again:

Teenager with months to live told terminal cancer might be ‘stress’

A British girl with just months to live was told by doctors that her rare cancer might be “stress” and that she should try using a “mindfulness” app.

Doctors failed to recognise that the schoolgirl had terminal cancer and suggested that she try an app to cope with her “indescribable agony”, she and her family have said.

Olivia Maunder, 15, began experiencing some light pain in her lower back when she was 13 in 2020, but did not see a GP until January 2021 after her pain worsened over the Christmas period.

She found that her symptoms steadily deteriorated to the point where she was taken “screaming in pain” to accident and emergency.

She was later diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma, a rare form of cancer affecting the bones and surrounding tissue. She now has just months to live.
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However, when she had an MRI scan of her pelvis in March 2021, doctors at Frimley Park Hospital in Camberley, Surrey, missed her tumour and diagnosed her with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), which is thought to be caused by the body reacting abnormally to injury.

The teenager, from Bordon, Hampshire, said that she was even told she was “mirroring” her mother’s pain from back problems.
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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.
 
Sean said:
The real cost of indulging in psychologising, and why it must be stopped.
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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.

livinglighter said:
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.
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I'm so very sorry to hear this, its appalling.
 
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.
 
Merged thread

Woman with infected blood told for decades she was hypochondriac, Times (UK), May/2024

‘Four of us were infected blood victims — I’m the only one still alive’
Kaya Burgess
The Times (of London) 17/05/2024

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...hat-went-wrong-the-other-three-died-dsvf060fs

Headline not referring to woman whose story is told later in article.

'While many have been fighting for answers for decades, for Tracey McWilliams, 63, from Bournemouth the whole concept of the infected blood scandal is “all very new to me”.

For decades she suffered from a range of debilitating symptoms including “horrendous” itching, night sweats, fatigue, low mood and brain fog, but doctors repeatedly told her it must be down to iron deficiency, lactose intolerance, fibromyalgia, the menopause or simply the rigours of being a mother.

She found herself having to keep “packing jobs in” because they would leave her so exhausted that she would “end up in bed the next day … literally crippled with pain”. Her family had to give up their home as they could not afford the mortgage repayments and she was treated like a hypochondriac.

It was only in March last year, on moving to a new GP, that her symptoms were finally traced back 35 years to blood transfusions — 36 units in total — that she received after giving birth in 1988.

She discovered that, for three decades, she had been carrying hepatitis C, a virus that can cause extreme liver damage and cancer if left untreated for too long. Hepatitis C was only formally identified in 1989 and the symptoms are often slow to show and easily confused with other conditions. It is thought that hundreds of others may, like McWilliams, be unknowingly living with the virus.'

This whole scandalous story is full of just awful, terrible accounts of what happened.
 
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JohnTheJack said:
‘Four of us were infected blood victims — I’m the only one still alive’
Kaya Burgess
The Times (of London) 17/05/2024

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...hat-went-wrong-the-other-three-died-dsvf060fs

Headline not referring to woman whose story is told later in article.

'While many have been fighting for answers for decades, for Tracey McWilliams, 63, from Bournemouth the whole concept of the infected blood scandal is “all very new to me”.

For decades she suffered from a range of debilitating symptoms including “horrendous” itching, night sweats, fatigue, low mood and brain fog, but doctors repeatedly told her it must be down to iron deficiency, lactose intolerance, fibromyalgia, the menopause or simply the rigours of being a mother.

She found herself having to keep “packing jobs in” because they would leave her so exhausted that she would “end up in bed the next day … literally crippled with pain”. Her family had to give up their home as they could not afford the mortgage repayments and she was treated like a hypochondriac.

It was only in March last year, on moving to a new GP, that her symptoms were finally traced back 35 years to blood transfusions — 36 units in total — that she received after giving birth in 1988.

She discovered that, for three decades, she had been carrying hepatitis C, a virus that can cause extreme liver damage and cancer if left untreated for too long. Hepatitis C was only formally identified in 1989 and the symptoms are often slow to show and easily confused with other conditions. It is thought that hundreds of others may, like McWilliams, be unknowingly living with the virus.'

This whole scandalous story is full of just awful, terrible accounts of what happened.
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Do you think you might stumble across web archive versions of this article somewhere?
 
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

Walking along a sunny, cobbled street in Mallorca, eating ice creams alongside my husband and daughter, my phone rang.

It was my GP. ‘The results of your MRI scans are back in,’ she said, ‘and I have to say, Lou, it is looking like MS’.

I stopped in shock. All I could say was, ‘Oh. Oh.’

Then I asked her: ‘And… what exactly is MS?’.

Back at the hotel, I started Googling – and I was terrified.

MS is incurable. It can affect the brain and spinal cord, causing symptoms that can include problems with balance, sensation, arm and leg movement and vision. I had no idea what my diagnosis meant for me, whether I was going to need a wheelchair, or how I was going to function at all.

I’d always had medical problems. I had issues with my bowel and bladder in my late teens, including recurrent UTIs and horrible constipation issues, and was quickly diagnosed with IBS.

Then, in my late 20s, I started getting tinnitus regularly, along with migraines and bouts of fatigue, and I had what I now know are internal tremors – I’d feel like I was shaking, almost violently, but only from within.

The symptom that concerned me most was severe dizziness and vertigo, which started in my late 20s. It stopped me from functioning; I’d have to lie down for hours, sometimes days, before I could move again.
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I knew there was something wrong but doctors kept misdiagnosing me (msn.com)
 
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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.
 
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