Why Does Misdiagnosis Occur?

There are many ways that a diagnosis can go wrong. There may be contributing factors from any of the players:

It seems poor form to blame a patient/client for a wrong diagnosis, and indeed blame is probably the wrong word. Nevertheless, the patient/client is involved and can contribute to a wrong diagnosis.

a) Self-diagnosis: The most likely way for a patient/client to contribute to a misdiagnosis is attempting to do so themselves without health professional advice. That is akin to using your body as a laboratory and you the person with the white coat. LOL. Reminds me of the old saying that a person who acts as his or her own attorney has a fool for a client. And what a boon for peddlers to sell you whatever.

b) Not reporting symptoms: Sometimes patients/clients don't tell the health professional everything. Sometimes symptoms are embarrassing. Other times you might think they're not worth mentioning. Some people won't mention a symptom unless the health professional asks, and assume it must be irrelevant if the health professional doesn't ask about it directly. Always tell the health professional everything, no matter how trivial, no matter if you believe it unrelated. Let the health professional have all the facts. Now see if they include how you look at breathing given what you learn in our courses.

c) Failure to complete ordered tests: In some cases, patients/clients don't get diagnostic tests done, even when a health professional has ordered the tests. This can occur due to oversight, complacency, laziness, stresses of life such as being locked in your home, or embarrassment. For example, one contributing factor to delayed diagnosis of colon cancer is patient/clients' perceived embarrassment over tests such as colonoscopy and sigmoidoscopy or getting a series of colonics and learning what is “seen”.

Since the health professional may have to make a diagnosis, it is certainly possible to make the wrong diagnosis. There are many ways that this can occur.

a) Health professionals know only common diseases: There are more than 20,000 documented human diseases, and probably many more undocumented ones and health professionals only know the most common. And how many of the undocumented ones disappear or never present due to proper natural hygiene?

b) Over-publicized diseases: Any health challenges that get a lot of attention tend to get over-diagnosed. This means that less common health challenges that might have similar symptoms are sometimes overlooked. Add to that the drug industry is very busy creating new ones. Ones that mostly did not exist 75 years ago. And look out for all the side effects that create side effects that create other side effects and further confuse what might be rather simple.

c) Different health professional skill levels: Not all health professionals are alike. A general health practitioner may be well versed in common health challenges but not in rarer areas that a specialist would know better. Or a completely different perspective such as Traditional Chinese Medicine of herbs, acupuncture, massage, Qigong or Ancient India's Ayurveda.

d) Health professional bias: All health professionals are human and have biases. They can have the "hammer-and-nail" bias: if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If they see a certain disease frequently, they will diagnose it frequently and might make an error if it is not that disease or health challenge, but something with similar symptoms. This tendency to go with what is familiar is also seen in treatments, where a surgeon will recommend surgery more often, but an endocrinologist will recommend pills more often. And very few will recommend a fast or liver cleanse.

e) Saving you money: Though rare these days, because many also get paid when you take more tests, some health professionals will avoid tests, assuming that you don't want to pay extra costs. Sounds good, maybe. For example, if there is a very rare condition, say 1-in-200, should your health professional get you to test for it? Some health professionals won't even tell you about this type of test. This is supposed to work fine for the majority, but fails for the very large percentage who might have the second health challenge or no challenge that can‘t be addressed with safe non-drug approaches.

f) Lack of time: It really is quite sad how little time most traditional health professionals will typically spend with a patient/client. Most use something like a 15 minute appointment or less. That doesn't give the health professional much time to ask a few questions, make a tentative analysis, order some tests to confirm it, and then answer some questions from the patient/client. We'd all like to think that, later, the health professional went and double-checked a supposed set of symptoms in their books, with other specialists, and consulted the latest research about how to address it correctly, but it seems rather unlikely! In reality, too many health professionals have to shoot from the hip. My holistic cardiologist spends 2+ hours or so with all his clients a few times a year. Love the guy.

g) Behavioral/mental symptoms that are hard to analyze: Some types of symptoms are just hard to understand. This is particularly true of those regarding emotional or mental well-being including the ones influenced by Optimal breathing pattern disorder or what I call UDB.

Imagine how many so-called clinical studies would be tossed out if it was discovered the overlooked undetected factors of distorted breathing?

The various medical tests that are used to confirm or rule out diagnosis can also sometimes fail. They might be useful diagnostic tools but are often far from perfect. The parameters for health vary widely depending on the skill of the health professional and are usually lower than a type five/optimal wellness recommendations might present.

a) Human errors: Of course, a simple human error can occur in any of the various tests. For example, samples could get contaminated or mixed up, or the test procedure might get done improperly. The practitioner may be new at the game. Some tests require a visual inspection, such as cell tests for cancer (e.g. Pap smears), and rely on the human judgment of the person inspecting them. Naturally, errors may not be rare.

b) Error margins- False positives, False negatives: All laboratory tests, especially ones like for COVID-19, have known conditions under which they fail. They can either fail with a false positive, wrongly indicating that you have a condition when you don't or a false negative, wrongly indicating you don't when you actually do. Either way will get you the wrong diagnosis. If you read the documentation about each test, you'll see that there are known limitations for each test. Some tests fail on some people because of the special features of a person or their situation. Some tests for one symptom will fail if you have some other rare health challenges. There are a few world-class health professionals such as Dr.Bruce West D.C., who advise strongly against most testing as being too expensive and steering people into costly and unnecessary drug use or surgical procedures and overlooking things that can be addressed with simple diet, supplement, and lifestyle changes. Think about the fact that virtually no medical doctor will prescribe a fast or liver cleanse, both of which are in my opinion two of the most powerful healing tools there are.

                          My mantra is Breath is Life. Start with breathing, proceed from there.