A totally wrong diagnosis is a severe misdiagnosis. This occurs when you seek medical advice for a condition and are diagnosed as having an incorrect condition. Self-diagnosis has a very high risk of this form of total misdiagnosis, far moreso than a doctor's diagnosis.
A wrong disease misdiagnosis is the typical fear of people diagnosed with a condition for their symptoms. This can occur for any condition at all, and all conditions have a list of alternative diagnoses, and any given symptom may indicate numerous possible conditions. However, misdiagnosis occurs more commonly for certain conditions. There are certain groups of conditions that are under-diagnosed (missed as a diagnosis too often), or over-diagnosed (given as an incorrect diagnosis), or are simply difficult to diagnose.
Perhaps surprisingly, it is also possible to get
diagnosed with a disease when in fact there is nothing wrong.
This is less likely if you actually have symptoms,
but there are various situations where you might
seek medical advice without symptoms.
A typical example is a regular checkup or a regular screening test.
All forms of tests have false positives,
when they indicate a problem when there isn't one,
and a doctor's reliance on a single test can cause
a misdiagnosis of a healthy person.
» Next page: Failure to Diagnose
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