Comment by mistercow
13 years ago
>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.