The prospect of walking into a hospital or clinic and receiving a misdiagnosis is something that fills most patients with dread.
An incorrect medical assessment can be, at best, a hassle, or at worst, expensive, dangerous, and even deadly.
One Johns Hopkins study revealed that out of 6,000 patients across the United States, health practitioners misdiagnosed 1 out of every 71 cancer cases. The same report showed that 1 out of 5 cancers were also misclassified. Errors like these can result in dangerously delayed or ineffective treatment.
Known as the “big three” within the medical community, the top conditions subject to misdiagnosis are cancers, vascular events, and infections.
In another evaluation of 538 patient diagnostic errors, 28 percent were life-threatening, resulted in death, or created permanent disability.
Concurrently, faulty assessments are costing the economy billions of dollars. In 2009, a report put the cost of unnecessary medical services resulting from misdiagnoses at $750 billion annually.
Even today, research points to wasteful clinical services as a critical driver of excess health spending, accounting for upward of 15.7 percent of total national health spending.
Terrible Price to Pay
When it comes to diagnosing health issues, there are multiple areas where things can go wrong. Danielle Miller, CEO of health consulting firm Stars and Stripes Consulting LLC, told The Epoch Times that multiple factors across the entire spectrum of health care services are contributing to the misdiagnosis problem.Those factors include “[errors] in diagnostic testing results, incomplete evaluation or history of the patient, premature diagnosis made without completing appropriate diagnostic testing, and evaluation due to guidelines and teaching ... just to name a few,” Miller said.
Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which threw another wrench into an industry already struggling with accurate diagnostics.
“Telemedicine was mass adopted in a short time frame during the pandemic. This led to many incomplete and error prone systems being used,” Miller said, adding that “there was little to no widespread knowledge or education for appropriate evaluation and diagnosis with telehealth.”
For some, diagnostic errors during the pandemic resulted in months of crippling medical bills and tragedy.
In the city of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, Dawn Gratke watched a misdiagnosis nightmare unfold over nearly four months that ultimately cost her husband’s life.
“I couldn’t believe it then. I still can’t believe it,” Gratke told The Epoch Times.
In September 2021, Gratke was convinced her husband, John, had gotten “some kind of bug.” He had classic flu symptoms, including fever and body aches, which Gratke was helping him manage at home since they didn’t appear to be serious. He had no respiratory symptoms at all, she said.
Then, on the evening of Sept. 25, her husband went into cardiac arrest at their home.
In a panic, she called 911. Paramedics were able to stabilize her husband after they arrived and rushed him to a nearby hospital.
Gratke drove to the hospital along with their equally distraught teenage daughter, who had witnessed the horrifying event. Within a few hours of arrival, John was put on a ventilator—despite lacking respiratory symptoms—after the staff induced a medical coma.
The following day, John tested positive for COVID-19. Gratke and her daughter also tested positive for the virus.
“It was all about COVID after that. Everything was COVID. They didn’t even look at other possibilities,” Gratke said.
John remained in a coma until Oct. 11, when he slowly regained consciousness. The long recovery process began, but his wife noted the doctors still wouldn’t discuss what else might have caused John to go into cardiac arrest on that fateful September night.
“The rest played out like a bad dream,” she said.
John’s recovery was slow and then began to backslide near the end of October, when he presented with flu-like symptoms again.
“I helped roll him on his side one day because he said he was in pain, and there was a nasty infected bed sore,” Gratke said.
Despite that John appeared to obviously be suffering from an infection, as Gratke maintains, the attending physician disagreed, concluding the flu symptoms were more likely to be “long COVID” related. Undeterred, Gratke pressed for more tests, determined to get to the bottom of what was happening with her husband.
After being diagnosed with a staph infection more than a week later, John was treated with antibiotics. However, it proved to be too little, too late. The infection had become systemic; it took two agonizing months for John to die amid a slew of failed attempts to stop the infection. The delayed diagnosis proved deadly for a man with an already weakened immune system.
The same week the hospital began treating John with antibiotics, Gratke said the doctor admitted there was a possibility her husband had been fighting a different, non-COVID-19-related infection that had gone undetected upon his admission in September.
On Jan. 8 of this year, Gratke felt her husband squeeze her hand for the last time. Their teenage daughter and their oldest son, who had returned from college, were in the hospital elevator on the way to see their father as he quietly slipped away.
“My husband was essentially murdered,” she said. “They didn’t follow protocols, and they misdiagnosed his symptoms.”
Gratke and her family are now suing the hospital for malpractice.
Expensive Mistakes
In a 2021 report published by the National Library of Medicine, the diagnostic process within the context of COVID-19 was admitted to be “complex and challenging” for health care professionals.“Although we have improved our capacity to make a more precise diagnosis, we still don’t have an explicit number of patients who are hospitalized for COVID alone,” Dr. William Schaffner, professor of medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, told The Epoch Times.
He explained that despite improvements in testing since the onset of the pandemic, it remains problematic in some cases to determine to what extent COVID-19 plays a primary or secondary role in acute illness.
At the same time, the cost of diagnostic errors continues to add up for Americans. Since 2011, family insurance premiums have risen 47 percent. Some industry insiders believe malpractice claims are contributing to this trend.
“Every misdiagnosis leads to an increase in overall health care costs,” attorney Collen Clark, founder of Schmidt & Clark, told The Epoch Times.
“Misdiagnosis leads to higher medical costs and higher income loss. It also negatively impacts insurance providers.”
Up to 18,000 claims are filed every year, with an average payout of more than $10,000 per lawsuit.
For people like Gratke, though, the price of health care isn’t nearly as painful as the cost of misdiagnosis.
“It cost me everything, losing John,” she said.
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