The fact that the subject of the OP was diagnosed fairly quickly struck me; more often than not, as you mention, rare diseases are misdiagnosed or completely mi

The fact that the subject of the OP was diagnosed fairly quickly struck me; more often than not, as you mention, rare diseases are misdiagnosed or completely missed. I've often wondered if someone hasn't done a long term statistical analysis of the probability of seeing rare diseases. It's one thing to think you have a rare disease (and is statistically very unlikely), but if you are a doctor seeing already self-selected ill subjects, wouldn't that change the probabilities significantly? I know modern medicine is quite mentally taxing, and most doctors are trained to be conservative, but maybe just emphasizing the fact that the statistics are different for the population of people seeing doctors might go a long ways to convince doctors not to automatically lump illnesses into the most common categories. That, and making the tests cheaper (like all of them, virtually zero cost; who wouldn't just throw every test they can think of at a problem if the tests were dirt cheap).