Meador Revisited: Nondisease in the Nineties

Excerpt

It has been more than a quarter century since the publication of "The Art and Science of Nondisease" (1), a delightful satire in which Meador showed how diagnostic misadventures could lead practitioners to identify diseases that were not actually present. Although costs were implied, explicit mention of expense, frustration, and embarrassment was made only at the conclusion of the paper. We are now in an era of accountability, and it is time for a re-examination of nondisease with an emphasis on its costs.

Meador's original classification included mimic syndromes, upper- and lower-limit problems, normal variants, laboratory errors, overinterpretations, and overreaction