Did some doctors tell parents that their partially paralyzed children are faking their symptoms? Experts say some doctors leap to psychiatric problems when faced with perplexing conditions.

Faking Symptoms

It was in October of 2014 when a 7-year-old was brought to the hospital because she couldn’t move her neck, right shoulder, or leg. There, the doctor told her parents that she wasn’t really paralyzed, but was merely faking as an emotional response to the birth of her younger sister just a few months earlier. Her parents dismissed the psychiatric diagnosis, and were eventually proven right when MRI scans showed that she actually had acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), a polio-like illness that affects the nervous system.

Similarly, a mother of a child with AFM who founded a Facebook group with the parents of hundreds of other children with the condition say that one in 10 of them experienced being told that the paralysis was just in the children’s heads.

Back in 2014, not a lot of people knew about AFM, and doctors do not immediately jump to an AFM diagnosis when presented with paralysis symptoms. Now however, AFM is on the rise and has since affected hundreds more children since 2014.

Diagnosis Problem

Although the parents do understand that AFM is not a very common disease, they do wonder why their children were not subjected to thorough tests for other causes of paralysis instead of immediately being diagnosed with psychological conditions.

Experts say that physicians sometimes tend to jump to psychiatric diagnoses when they are faced with unique or puzzling conditions. Not that they do not know how to treat the patient, but that the uncertainty of a diagnosis perhaps makes them turn to psychiatric diagnoses, instead of giving a wrong diagnosis and ending up treating the patient for a condition he or she does not have.

According to experts, it is imperative for physicians to conduct thorough examinations of the patients before giving a psychiatric diagnosis, and to get a second opinion should the cause of the patient’s illness still prove elusive.