"in 2016, the Brain Tumour Charity released a report on the treatment of brain tumour patients in the United Kingdom. It found that almost one in three of them had visited a doctor more than five times before receiving their diagnosis. Nearly a quarter weren’t diagnosed for more than a year.
Women, as well as low-income patients, experienced longer delays...
The tendency to attribute women’s physical complaints to mental illness has its roots in the history of ‘hysteria’ – that mythical female disorder that, over the centuries, was blamed on a ‘wandering womb’ or sensitive nerves and eventually, post-Freud, came to be seen as a psychological problem. The terms have changed over the last century, but the concept – that the unconscious mind can ‘produce’ physical symptoms – has remained alive and well in medicine.
There is a high risk of misdiagnosis inherent in this concept, whether it’s called hysteria, somatisation, or ‘medically unexplained symptoms’ due to stress...
Consider the experience of patients with rare diseases, who go more than seven years, on average, before being correctly diagnosed. Along the way, they visit four primary care doctors and four specialists and receive two to three misdiagnoses.
While some delay in diagnosing an uncommon disease may be inevitable, this staggering seven-year gap is not simply because it takes that long for doctors to crack a challenging case. According to a Eurordis survey of 12,000 rare disease patients in Europe, those who were initially misdiagnosed experienced longer diagnostic journeys. And, while being misdiagnosed with the wrong physical disease doubled the time it took to get to the right diagnosis, getting a psychological misdiagnosis extended it even more – by 2.5 up to 14 times, depending on the disease."
I've personally heard about two different women - one a friend from college now a grad student at Stanford, the other a friend's aunt who is a doctor in London - who had brain tumors go undiagnosed for months.
FB: "Studies in the 1990s suggested that as many as 30-50% of women diagnosed with depression were misdiagnosed. Furthermore, depression and anxiety are themselves symptoms of other diseases, which often go unrecognised in women. And, of course, the stress of suffering from an undiagnosed – and therefore untreated – disease often takes its mental toll. As one article points out, “Ironically, medical misdiagnoses of physical conditions may induce depressive reactions in female patients.”"
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