Do You REALLY Have Multiple Sclerosis?
Getting a multiple sclerosis diagnosis can be devastating.
MS is a progressive, incurable condition in which your body’s own immune system attacks the fatty tissue surrounding the nerves in your brain.
The result is nerve damage that leads to symptoms ranging from numbness and weakness to lack of coordination, to tremors.
But what if you’ve been misdiagnosed?
Researchers have just published a study showing that doctors misdiagnose MS FAR more often than you’d think.
Here’s what you need to know.
According to a recent report, MS is misdiagnosed in as many as 1 in 5 patients.
That means it’s possible that 20% of the people who think they have MS really don’t.
You might think that’s great news for that lucky 20 %.
But there are a few problems here.
The first is that those individuals are taking MS drugs that can come with horrible side effects… for no reason.
One of the worst is a treatment that can cause progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, a condition that targets nerve cells and damages white matter in the brain.
That’s right, even if you don’t actually have MS, you could be taking a drug that damages your nerve cells anyway!
The other problem with getting misdiagnosed is that you’re not getting treated for whatever condition you actually do have.
So the obvious question is, if it’s not MS, what is it?
Most often the MS-like symptoms are caused by either a stroke or a migraine.
Both can resemble MS.
Stroke, for example, shares symptoms like dizziness, numbness, slurred speech, and difficulty walking.
And believe it or not, migraines share similarities as well, including dizziness and vision impairment.
And in some cases, the true culprit is a vitamin B12 deficiency!
These conditions can even look similar on an MRI test!
According to this recent study, most of the people who were misdiagnosed received (the wrong) treatment for four years before the right diagnosis was made.
Besides the physical and emotional toll this kind of medical mistake takes on the patient, the cost of the unnecessary treatments was in the $10 million range.
None of this is good news.
And unfortunately, researchers still don’t have more accurate ways of testing these individuals.
The good news here is that a study like this that highlights the problem will encourage doctors to dig deeper when making these kinds of diagnoses, and will also set the medical community on the path to uncovering a more accurate form of diagnosis.
