BOOM

JON RAPPOPORT

∙ PAID

From studyfinds.org, April 2017:

A new study finds that nearly 9 in 10 people who go for a second opinion after seeing a doctor are likely to leave with a refined or new diagnosis from what they were first told.

Researchers at the Mayo Clinic examined 286 patient records of individuals who had decided to consult a second opinion, hoping to determine whether being referred to a second specialist impacted one’s likelihood of receiving an accurate diagnosis.

The study, conducted using records of patients referred to the Mayo Clinic’s General Internal Medicine Division over a two-year period, ultimately found that when consulting a second opinion, the physician only confirmed the original diagnosis 12 percent of the time.

Among those with updated diagnoses, 66% received a refined or redefined diagnosis, while 21% were diagnosed with something completely different than what their first physician concluded.

Don’t let that “refined or redefined” fool you. A different diagnosis OF ANY KIND most often means a different treatment than originally called for will be given.

“I went to the first doctor and he gave me a prescription for X, but the second doctor wrote a script for Y and said surgery might be necessary, too…”

The article I quoted above considers the second diagnosis correct. But who knows? Maybe the first doctor was right.

Maybe they were both wrong.

What’s at stake here? Millions and millions of medical diagnoses.

And the health and lives of those patients.

The basic set-up is age old. It goes back to the dawn of history. A person is confused and afraid. He doesn’t feel well. He wants to know why. He wants to know: WHAT IS IT?

So he goes to someone who is supposed to know. He asks the question and gets an answer. He accepts the answer.

The medical cartel lives off of that pattern.

When a doctor not only supplies an answer but prescribes a drug, the “fact” of the diagnosis is further confirmed. The patient thinks: Why would the doctor give a drug—unless his assessment of what was wrong was true?

And as we all know, when the patient experiences effects from a toxic medicine, the doctor will say these effects are new symptoms of the THING he diagnosed. MORE confirmation that the doctor was “right” in his original assessment.

OR the doctor can play the switch game. His original diagnosis was ADHD. He prescribed a speed-type drug. The patient then went into a series of ups and downs—from the drug. The last episode was a down. The doctor then diagnoses Clinical Depression. New drug. The result? More severe ups and downs. Then, new diagnosis: Bipolar. New drugs…

There are a number of ways a diagnosis can be dead wrong:

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