You have some serious symptoms making you feel miserable, yet your doctors remain puzzled about your diagnosis. Meanwhile, your health continues to worsen.
What could be making you sick that your doctors are failing to diagnose?
Some possible hard-to-diagnose conditions
Below are some common conditions that are difficult for some physicians to get a definitive diagnosis:
- Multiple sclerosis (MS) – Like other autoimmune diseases, MS can be a challenge to initially diagnose because its symptoms come and go with no apparent reason. In actuality, the patient’s nerve cells are disrupting the way their brain communicates with their body. But diagnostic tools like MRIs and spinal taps can confirm suspected cases and set a course of disease management.
- Appendicitis – Most cases present with the typical painful tenderness centered around the navel, nausea, fever and vomiting. But not all patients’ bodies are built like the anatomical structures doctors are used to seeing. An appendix can be located more to the posterior part of the body. When the anterior symptoms are negative, doctors could misdiagnose appendicitis until the organ bursts and floods the body with toxins that lead to potentially fatal sepsis.
- Diabetes – It’s difficult to believe in this day and age that diabetes could be misdiagnosed. Yet it can and does happen. Some patients avoid seeing their doctor until they literally collapse from either hypo- or hyperglycemia. Doctors may suspect something else, like a stroke or a brain tumor, which is why running a full blood panel is so vital when patients present in the emergency room (ER).
These are just a few of the potentially lethal conditions an overworked or undertrained doctor could miss. If something similar occurs to you or a loved one, you may want to learn more about Nevada’s medical malpractice laws.
