Comment by GiraffeNecktie
13 years ago
It's possible but not so likely, the 60s was not the Middle Ages. In any case, he was clearly very sick when he returned to the island and eventually felt better, became strong and lived into his 90's. Not that that proves anything in itself. It's just a journalistic device to illustrate the point of the story which is that people on this island do live a remarkably long time and that it's worth asking why this is so.
>It's possible but not so likely
There are a lot of people, so it's pretty likely that a handful will be misdiagnosed with terminal illnesses, but never find out they were misdiagnosed. Those handful are the ones you'll hear about.
After all, you aren't going to read the amazing story of the guy who was given nine months to live, and then died nine months later.
But on the other hand, if someone is diagnosed with a terminal disease and somehow has a very unlikely recovery that's also disporportionatly likely to make the news. Though we shouldn't dwell too much on the quality of the diagnosis, the fact that we have news organizations filtering our data should make us skeptical about the link between the island and his apparent recovery.
The odds of a random person being misdiagnosed are quite low. The odds of a person diagnosed with a terminal disease who goes into spontaneous remission having been previously misdiagnosed are quite a lot higher.