Facts & Figures

Cancer Misdiagnosed
A 1999 study of cancer patients nationwide by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that 1.4% of pathology results – or 30,000 patients – were misdiagnosed annually. And 20% of the recommended treatments for cancer patients were also incorrect, the study found. The risk of mistakes varies by type of cancer. In the same study, biopsies involving the female reproductive tract were particularly prone to mistakes, with an error rate of 5.1%. Skin cancer had a pathology error rate of 2.9%
Click here to see the study.

Doctor's Withhold Information From Patients
The American Medical Association’s Institute of Ethics asked this question in a survey of doctors: “What does a doctor do when faced with a patient who would benefit from a medical service that is not going to be covered [by their insurance or HMO]?” Some 42 percent of the doctors said they “never withheld any information”. But 58 percent of the surveyed doctors admitted that they have withheld information from their patients (8% said “rarely”, 23% said “sometimes”, and 8% responded that they withheld information “often or “very often”).
This information was reported on CNN’s program “American Morning” on July 10, 2003, at 8:46AM Eastern Time by Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
Click here to see the study.


More Studies Regarding Misdiagnosed Cancer
Some 1.3 million people are diagnosed with cancer every year. The person making the diagnosis is usually a pathologist who has analyzed the patient's tissue in a lab, but has never met the patient in person. When researchers at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore reviewed tissue samples from 6,000 cancer patients across the country, they found one out of every 71 cases was misdiagnosed; for example, a biopsy was labeled cancerous when it was not. And up to one out of five cancer cases was misclassified.
Source: ABC World New Tonight