Many have misdiagnosed illnesses

It's a little frightening to hear that a misdiagnosis of deadly cancer can happen form something like a lump under the skin, but that is just what happened to a patient recently.

The real diagnosis? A harmful fatty growth -- but no tumor. How can such an incorrect diagnosis happen with a medical professional who is trained to find problems? Hard to say, but when a rare type of lymphoma is not even close to what the real problem is, I say something is terribly wrong.

But, it happens, and quite often. In 2005, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association gave up a startling fact: doctors are wrong 10 percent to 15 percent of the time. That's what all those second opinions are good for, I guess.