A growing, unregulated subset of diagnostic tests is leading to patient harm because of misdiagnoses and misunderstandings by doctors and patients. Several Lyme disease tests that have never proven to work are prompting patients to take years of unnecessary, expensive and harmful antibiotics. A new generation of prenatal screening tests is prompting some abortions of healthy fetuses because of a lack of FDA oversight, a highly competitive market and doctors’ misunderstanding of complex statistics.
