Longtime Senator Pete Domenici announced his retirement in October 2007 under the worst of circumstances. He wasn’t retiring because of some political scandal; instead, it was something far more tragic. He announced his diagnosis of a fatal brain disease called frontotemporal lobar degeneration. Just after Thanksgiving, the senator issued a surprise announcement: His disease had gone away, or at least not gotten any worse. Domenici got the good news when, earlier in the year, he had offered to take part in a clinical trial of people who had been diagnosed with frontotemporal lobar degeneration. Domenici was contacted by the lead doctor in the trial study and told he didn’t qualify for the trial because the tests couldn’t find a link between the senator’s symptoms and his frontal lobe. "I concluded … that I must not have the disease," Domenici said in a Nov. 26 interview with the Albuquerque Journal , adding that he may have been healed by God through the power of prayer. His sister, a nun, has been asking God for help, and people Domenici meets often tell him that they are praying for him. "Brain Disease Either Gone or Stalled" was the front page article’s subhead. The senator may indeed have been miraculously healed by prayer, though a closer look at the facts suggests a different explanation. Both the leader of the trial study and the doctor who first diagnosed Domenici say there is clear evidence of Domenici’s brain disease and resulting cognitive disorder; the disease did not go away. It’s just that the specific origin of the disease didn’t seem to be the frontal lobe, as the original diagnosis had indicated, and may not be as bad as had been feared. It’s like being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, then later being told you don’t have Alzheimer’s, but another form of dementia. The impression of a miracle cure can be created by something as simple as a misdiagnosis. One sage piece of medical advice is "always get a second opinion." If doctors and medical tests were always right the first time, there would be no need to seek a second (or third) opinion or test. Doctors sometimes make mistakes, and all medical tests have a margin of error that includes false positives (finding that a disease or problem exists when it does not). There’s also a, psychological reason why patients may often fare better than their diagnosis would suggest: Many doctors err on the side of bad news to avoid giving their patients false hope. It is better to have the patient get good news if the diagnosis is wrong (and recover unexpectedly or "miraculously") than bad news (and not recover when expected).And, of course, diseases progress at different rates in different people. A given patient’s health, genetics and overall fitness have a lot to do with how quickly he or she will succumb to a disease. Some diseases are more aggressive than others, and some stall or even get better on their own without treatment. A recent study by Norwegian researchers published in the Archives of Internal Medicine suggest that some breast cancers may go away on their own, with or without treatment. Hope can be wonderful and healing; hopefully the doctors and tests are wrong yet again, and Sen. Domenici’s disease has indeed disappeared, as he believes. If Domenici truly is the recipient of a miracle cure, then he has little to worry about. On the other hand, if the miracle is instead merely a misdiagnosis, then the senator needs real treatment, not false hope.
Benjamin Radford has investigated claims of faith healing, miracle cures and psychic "medical intuitives" for more than a decade. He hopes to one day find a verifiable case of a miracle cure, but until then he's satisfied with modern medicine.
