It's possible but not so likely, the 60s was not the Middle Ages. In any case, he was clearly very sick when he returned to the island and eventually felt better, became strong and lived into his 90's. Not that that proves anything in itself. It's just a journalistic device to illustrate the point of the story which is that people on this island do live a remarkably long time and that it's worth asking why this is so.

>It's possible but not so likely

There are a lot of people, so it's pretty likely that a handful will be misdiagnosed with terminal illnesses, but never find out they were misdiagnosed. Those handful are the ones you'll hear about.

After all, you aren't going to read the amazing story of the guy who was given nine months to live, and then died nine months later.

But on the other hand, if someone is diagnosed with a terminal disease and somehow has a very unlikely recovery that's also disporportionatly likely to make the news. Though we shouldn't dwell too much on the quality of the diagnosis, the fact that we have news organizations filtering our data should make us skeptical about the link between the island and his apparent recovery.

The odds of a random person being misdiagnosed are quite low. The odds of a person diagnosed with a terminal disease who goes into spontaneous remission having been previously misdiagnosed are quite a lot higher.

It's always possible of course, but from the article:

As he recalls, nine other doctors confirmed the diagnosis.

So if true, chances of a misdiagnosis are pretty slim.

He also recalls being 5 years older than his birth certificate says.

That's not uncommon on less urbanized parts of the world. But yeah, we can't tell for sure.

Yup, my mother doesn't now her real birthday, and she was born in '57 in Bosnia & Herzegovina.

The verdicts of 10 doctors of the same field, in the same era about the same patient are not exactly independent variables.

This cannot be stressed strongly enough, and yet is completely ignored (or worse, actively contested) by just about everyone.

Most people assume that something that has passed a "peer review" process has been reviewed independently by several people, and is thus more likely to be true. While the people do not collaborate, this is NOT independence in the statistical sense, and thus the likelihood of being is not as high as one would expect.

And the many examples of 50-year old accepted wisdom being utterly wrong (e.g. about eggs, cholesterol, salt, monetary easing, saturated fat, ...) seem to fall on deaf ears. At least from my experience.

It was 1976 and he claims 9 other doctors confirmed the diagnosis.

He probably told each successive doctor that n-1 doctors diagnosed him this way. The last 3 may have just agreed with the first 6 without performing much diagnosis.

I agree. I thought it was obvious from the first part of the article that the man was misdiagnosed.