In most cases people tend to have an unresponsive pain condition anywhere in the body. Some one might have tried several different treatments to relieve a particular problem, yet found no measurable relief. There is a good chance that it is the diagnosis and not the treatments that have failed.

Treatments can not cure a condition if they are not directed at the true cause of the problem. For example one might be the victim of misdiagnosed back pain.

A medical officer from Gisenyi district hospital reported a man who had been treated for mental illness because he suffered from sudden inability to speak. This was initially misdiagnosed as a "nervous breakdown” and other mental conditions.

He was later diagnosed as having had a stroke, and suffering from aphasia (inability to speak), a well-known complication of stroke or other brain conditions.

Sinusitis is also over diagnosed.  There is a tendency to give a diagnosis of sinusitis, when the condition is really a harmless complication of another infection, such as a common cold.

Whooping cough is often undiagnosed: Although most children in the modern world have been immunized against whooping cough also called pertussis, this protection wears off after about 15 years. Thus, any teen or adult with a persistent cough may actually have whooping cough. This is particularly dangerous for babies too young to be vaccinated, and any un-vaccinated children. Whooping cough can be fatal to an infant. The cough symptom of whooping cough is usually productive initially, but then becomes a persistent dry cough, lasting up to 100 days. Elderly grand parents may also be a reservoir of undiagnosed whooping cough.

Dementia may be a drug interaction: A common scenario in aged care is for a patient to show mental decline to dementia. Whereas this can of course occur due to various medical conditions, such as a stroke or Alzheimer’s disease, it can also occur from a side effect or interaction between multiple drugs that the elderly patient may be taking. There are also various other possible causes of dementia.

Mild traumatic brain injury often remains undiagnosed; although the symptoms of severe brain injury are hard to miss, it is less clear for milder injuries, or even those causing a mild concussion diagnosis.

The condition goes by the name of mild traumatic brain injury. Mild traumatic brain injury symptoms can be mild, and can continue for days or weeks after the injury.

Mild traumatic injury as balance problem: When a person has symptoms such as vertigo or dizziness, a diagnosis of brain injury may go overlooked. This is particularly true of mild traumatic brain injury for which the symptoms are typically mild. The symptoms are related to to a relatively mild brain injury, like after falling, that could have occurred days or even weeks ago. Vestibular dysfunction, causing vertigo-like symptoms, is a common complication of mild brain injury.

Brain pressure condition often misdiagnosed as dementia: A condition that results from an excessive pressure of CSF within the brain is often misdiagnosed. It may be misdiagnosed as Parkinson’s disease or dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease. The condition is called Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH) and is caused by having too much cerebral spinal fluid that is to say too much fluid on the brain.

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