The State : AIDS Misdiagnosis Found

Medical specialists say that as many as eight patients at the University of California’s AIDS clinic in San Francisco have been misdiagnosed by other doctors and do not really suffer from the lethal ailment. One man had nothing worse than a muscle strain, another patient had tuberculosis, and a third had chest pains which turned out to be early angina--a warning sign of heart disease, the school reported. Dr. Harry Hollander, director of the clinic, and Dawn D. Cortland, a clinic nurse, have published a report on the cases of “Pseudo-AIDS” in the Western Journal of Medicine. “The message from what we found is that not everyone in a risk group who gets sick is actually sick from AIDS,” Hollander said. “It’s too easy to pigeonhole these people and rush to a quick diagnosis--especially in a city like San Francisco where AIDS is on everyone’s mind.”