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@wellness100

May be we should not be too hard on the medical advise at initial diagnosis. At that stage, no one knows how the patient will respond to the treatment. Some doctors are better equipped because of their experience, doing the right blood work etc who can be more reassuring. But it is still a battle.
Dont mind me. I am just another layman trying to make some sense of the whole thing.

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Replies to "May be we should not be too hard on the medical advise at initial diagnosis. At..."

(Another layperson here.) That's a great point @wellness100 , but I also understand the anxiety — a doctor will have the opportunity to learn from a mistake and do better next time, but their patient might not.

That's one reason I'm a big fan of team approaches like we see at dedicated Cancer Centres or specialised clinics. They have a range from doctors with new ideas but little experience to doctors with old ideas but lots of experience (and everything in-between), together with specialised nurses and technicians to make sure the doctors don't stray too far off track.

Obviously misdiagnoses still happen. They have no absolutely-reliable way to predict how any given cancer will progress or how any given patient will respond to a treatment, and no way at all to detect individual cancer cells until they start to form tumours, so diagnosis has to be a combination of scientific analysis and (highly-educated) guesswork. However, through pooling a treatment team's knowledge and experience, I believe those misdiagnoses will happen less often and patient outcomes will improve.