pseudodiagnosis

9.9

A wrong medical decision that names the wrong illness or says someone has an illness when they do not

noun
/ˌsuːdoʊdaɪəɡˈnoʊsɪs/

Specialized

: pseudodiagnóstico

The doctor admitted that the pseudodiagnosis led to unnecessary treatments that harmed the patient.
diagnosis or pseudodiagnosis

Examples

Only events occurring before diagnosis or pseudodiagnosis were considered in the analysis.

Academic text (1991)
To see whether the increased negative score was merely a result rather than a cause of disease, these scores were analyzed for three periods (1-4, 5-8, 9-12 months) before the date of diagnosis or pseudodiagnosis.

Academic text (1991)
Controls were assigned a date of "pseudodiagnosis" according to the date on which they answered the questionnaire.

Academic text (1991)
GRAPH: Fig 2 - Mean positive score for cases and controls in the 12 months before diagnosis/pseudodiagnosis.

Academic text (1991)
He was frustrated when he discovered the pseudodiagnosis had resulted in a year of ineffective medication.
The patient's health deteriorated because of a pseudodiagnosis provided by a misinformed physician.

Synonyms

misdiagnosis

vspseudodiagnosis

5 4.8

A mistake about what disease a person has

can be deliberately false or misleading rather than an honest mistake

Surface Forms

pseudodiagnosis singular

pseudodiagnoses plural

Morphology

pseudodiagnosis = diagnosis (transparent) = pseudo + diagnosis

The meaning is directly built from 'pseudo-' meaning false and 'diagnosis' meaning a medical assessment.

Etymology

Pseudodiagnosis joins pseudo- 'false' with diagnosis 'a medical decision', like the verb diagnose you already know. So it means a 'false diagnosis', a wrong or misleading medical decision.