Unraveling Medical Mysteries

Patients without a diagnosis live in a medical purgatory. Their failure to receive one may be attributed to their having vague symptoms, such as a general feeling of malaise, weakness, or fluctuating muscle pain. They usually consult their primary care doctor, who, unable to provide a diagnosis, refers them to specialists: neurologists, gastroenterologists, rheumatologists, hematologists, cardiologists. Desperation fills their lives, amplified by physicians who dismiss their complaints as psychosomatic—in their heads—and then prescribe medications for mental health conditions, such as Prozac or Valium. Not infrequently, when a person’s symptoms are seen as manifestations of stress and anxiety, Alexandra Sifferlin writes in her engaging and illuminating The Elusive Body, it makes “getting a diagnosis deeply complicated and rife with uncertainty.” Doctors often retreat from continuing to care for such patients, frustrated that despite a physical exam and blood tests and scans they are unable to offer an answer. And without one, treatment becomes guesswork, ineffective at best, harmful at worst. Patients without a diagnosis typically feel they have exhausted every resource and don’t k...