Misdiagnosis

It is often reported that many healthy individuals are treated for serious and fife threatening diseases such as AIDS, TB or Cancer due to faulty diagnosis based on single pathological result or oversensitive medial diagnostic tools. Unfortunately for the patients, most of the time poor patients without financial support/medical insurance, the treatment starts, without confirmatory tests. Patients are made to undergo surgery where surgery is not really indicated.
One of the recent instances reported is a lady misdiagnosed for HIV and received treatment for almost 9 years before discovering she never actually had the virus that causes AIDS. In court, Jury awarded her US$2.5 million in damages. Similarly, non-carcinogenic growths are treated for cancer, some of the lung conditions are treated for tuberculosis, etc. The patients are made to live with the stigma for years, sometimes away from their family members.

Who is responsible for such incidents? Major responsibility lies with the medical doctor who decides on the line of treatment. He may be careless in suggesting the treatment without confirmation, greedy for money, lack of adequate interaction with the patient, not having the necessary expertise, lack of infrastructure availability for investigation, etc. A person working in Cement factory need not have lung cancer. It may be just inflammation of the lungs.
How to avoid such instances? One measure I can think of is stringent laws to prosecute such erring doctors and laboratories, free legal help for the poor from NGOs to fight in courts, and more important is the medical ethics which is missing these days.