A Brief Survey of Misdiagnoses

I have a theory about illnesses that are systemic, auto-immune, rheumatological, chronic, or difficult to diagnose with overlapping symptoms and tentative diagnostic criteria. My theory is that most doctors don’t have a clue what they are doing when they hit this territory. As far as I can tell, modern medicine is loosely grouping together collections of symptoms, making observations about the patterns by which each category breaks down your wellbeing, and matching medications that are known to be helpful in some instances, while useless in others.

Here is a collection of illnesses that fit the above description (Incidentally, these are all illnesses that some professional, at some point, suspected I had - to the best of my knowledge, they were all incorrect).

• Multiple Sclerosis
• Ankylosing Spondylitis
• IBS
• Crohn’s disease
• Fibromyalgia
• Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
• Pelvic Pain Syndrome
• Lyme’s disease
• ALS

I believe the symptoms and the suffering of people diagnosed with these things are very, very real; people I love have received these diagnoses, and they have struggled to find working treatments for their conditions. My skepticism is toward modern medicine’s approach to classifying and treating these conditions.

I’m curious about more macro theories, about why some bodies just “self-destruct” along the lines of these illnesses, and what vulnerabilities and triggers are involved...

A book that recently piqued my interest on this is “When The Body Says No: Exploring the Stress Disease Connection” by Gabor Mate.



A fuller review on this book later, and of course, a video for the impatient types.