While this article has to do with standard medicine, we must ask the question as it relates to the field of psychiatry, where there is no objective test for mental illness. While modern medicine has the option of at least being able to check their diagnosis, even if via the autopsy table, psychiatry does not. Psychiatrists do not order objective tests when diagnosing their diseases. From the New York Times:
The only sure way to study the extent of misdiagnosis is to compare autopsy results to a patient's final diagnosis. When researchers have done this, they have generally found a contradiction between the two in about 40 percent of cases. Roughly half of these misdiagnoses prevented the patient from getting treatment that could have made a difference.The paper can be seen here:
A good summary of the research appeared in a 1998 article in The Journal of the American Medical Association, by George D. Lundberg, then the publication's editor. He said recently that it still reflected his views.
Low-Tech Autopsies in the Era of High-Tech Medicine by George D. Lundberg, JAMA, Oct. 14, 1998 (pdf)
It is our opinion that misdiagnoses in the field of psychiatry will be much higher than in standard medicine precisely because there are no standardized objective tests. Further, if the diseases diagnosed are based on other considerations besides objective tests, then the misdiagnosis rate will trend off the chart.
It may even approach 100% when the understanding of the condition is fundamentally wrong.
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