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Comment by azan_ | Hacker News Reader

How is it possible? You can't diagnose tuberculosis just based on imaging and tuberculosis hospital has to know that!

Yeah, I know! It was strange. They gave me a test, and it came back negative, but they insisted it was negative because I had "latent tuberculosis," which supposedly wasn't detectable by the test yet but was about to become active.

I forgot to mention that, besides getting a second opinion from another radiologist, I also took a more modern test at another private clinic. That test has better detection rates than the one the state clinic used, and it came back negative too.

I have suspicions they had some kind of government quota to keep the hospital staffed with patients in order to receive funding. Or they were just completely incompetent. I pushed back by bringing them another radiologist's report and the results of a better test that I paid for myself, so I guess they decided to back down.

You'll find doctors always believe and treat the worst diagnosis any professional has put on a case. That's a legal thing, not a skill issue.

Think about the consequences of mistakes in both directions ...

Not only that, what is the point confining someone to prevent the spread of a disease about a quarter of the world is already infected with?

I suppose there could be reasons, but I don't know them.

Some countries and jurisdictions still have laws that allow for the involuntary confinement of tuberculosis patients, I guess dating back to the times when tuberculosis was rampant in those countries? And most professionals seem to be okay with the policy:

https://theunion.org/news/is-involuntary-incarceration-of-tb...

>17% said that, as a matter of principle, the involuntary incarceration of TB patients was inappropriate on any grounds.

>Regionally, members from Europe Region had the highest percentage of respondents objecting to the policy as a matter of principle (26.2%) while the North America Region had the lowest (3%).

The emergence of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in the 1990s is probably one of the reasons:

>Respondents most strongly supported the policy of incarceration for patients known to have multidrug-resistant TB (49.7%)

Because it’s a nasty disease, and they’d like to prevent its spread. A quarter of the world may have TB, but there are only like 10,000 cases in the US every year

Well you can't diagnose pyelonephritis without a urine culture as well, which my GP kindly noted after I already took a full 14 day dosis of antibiotics. The ER I was at before tried to, anyway.

Incentives.

Yea I find a lot of stories on the web about doctors misdiagnosing things to have oddities like this that don't seem to make sense. It often seems like the author is leaving something out. Not saying OP is lying, but tb is a very, very weird conclusion to come to from just one radiology report...

See my answer in this same subthread. I was perplexed myself as to why I was diagnosed based on just one radiology report. But the moral of my story is that you can always try to obtain a second opinion from another doctor. I'm not saying doctors shouldn't be trusted in general.

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