Sekeres’ Scary Cancer Warning on Misdiagnoses

Perhaps as shocking as a cancer diagnosis is opinion by specialist asking in WSJ op ed, “Are You Sure You Have Cancer?” He urges patients to “ask for a second opinion” since “misdiagnoses are all too common” aka 20% of the time.

As Dr. Mikkael Sekeres, chief of hematology at Miami U’s cancer center, opined: “Expert pathologists agree with the diagnoses of local doctors only 80% of the time. That means 1 in 5 patients may have been told that they had cancer when they didn’t, that they had a different cancer from the one growing … or that they were cancer-free when they weren’t.” While Dr. Sekeres was relaying studies involving bone marrow or blood cancers, he argued “similar rates of misdiagnosis have been reported in breast cancer, melanoma, lung cancer & other tumors.

Not only can the falsely alarmed patient be forced to face the dreaded “get your affairs in order” advice, Dr. Sekeres notes, but sometimes given the wrong treatment. In fact, in a study he led, “about 7% of patients who received the wrong diagnosis also received the wrong therapy … Some were undertreated, while others were given chemotherapy without a verified cancer diagnosis.” In short, Sekeres suggests, cancer diagnosis, “especially for rare forms of the disease,” is still as much an art as much as an exact science, that even the specialists like himself have yet to master since even THEY often disagree in a given case. Bottom line: Get a second opinion by a specialist who can confirm or debunk an original cancer sentence.

Davd Soul