My diagnosis took over 6 months, several specialists, and much pain and anxiety.

A device such as this would comoe up with it quicker, until it looked at my history.

You see, Sarcoid is typically diagnosed in young African American women. I’m a middle aged caucasian man.

So until it took an intuitive leap, it’s mundane.

This is not a rare organ failure. And Seattle is not exactly the back of beyond, medically speaking. I was aghast that they took so long. He described his initial symptoms to me during a phone call after his surgery, and it took me only 5 minutes on teh Google to find a diagnostic aid that recommended immediate hospitalization for a ruptured appendix based on just what he told me.

Back in the 1980′s I studied Expert Systems in my CS MSc classes. Medical diagnostics was one of the fields described as most eminently suitable for rule-based systems based on domain expert input during construction. I don’t mean simplistic decision tree diagnostics, I’m talking about fully associative rule-based reasoning systems. It was possible to do that even then on the early 8088 based IBM PC. I have to believe then that it is only this litigious society that has delayed the adoption of such technology.

“We heard of people who had spent their life savings trying to get proper diagnosis of the disease; of a seventy-six-year-old woman, with no social security, who had to look after middle-aged sons who were so badly affected they had to wear nappies all the time; of people visiting relatives in psychiatric hospitals, hearing them screaming and seeing them tied up; of one woman who spent $26,000 on medical bills for thirty-one different doctors before anyone recognized her condition; of families that had been decimated by Huntington’s; and of men and women who lost jobs because they were thought to be drunk. It certainly put Huntington’s in context.”

Yes. And part of that context, it must be said, is the abysmal quality of diagnosis provided. No one should have to visit thirty-one doctors to get their disease properly identified, no matter how rare that disease is (provided that it is not totally unknown). And Huntington’s chorea is not that rare; it affects five out of every 100,000 births. It was described in 1872, and Woody Guthrie began to show its effects in 1951. Such defective diagnosis is not a problem specific to Huntington’s chorea; it is a systemic and persistent shortcoming of the American medical establishment.