Archive link: https://archive.ph/rYlvQ

I think this would be an interesting article for discussion. Some of these articles in popular media I feel adopt an overly hostile tone toward doctors and assume the worst of a situation. Part of this is the necessity of health care privacy laws that prevent us from getting all sides of a story which could shed more light on a situation.

I think it also ignores the huge flipside problem of this, confidently telling someone they have a diagnosis even though you shouldn’t and they don’t. For instance I often see someone who’s been referred to me and told confidently they have a deadly disease or a genetic disease, told everyone in their life they have this, joined online support groups, and made big life choices based on that info, but they actually don’t have the disease. And the information the diagnosis was based on was nowhere near confident enough to say so. It was right to seek further evaluation and there may have been some abnormality, but even if the diagnosis should be mentioned as a possibility, the patient shouldn’t have been told they definitely have this thing yet because the certainty was just not there. Anyway, I think there’s lots of interesting aspects of this article to think about.