Talk:Diagnosis of exclusion

Sarcoidosis is only a diagnosis of exclusion until you take a biopsy. Sarcoidosis in the lung or heart can be proven with biopsy. The patient has inert tissue in lung or heart. There is some mean to diagnose sarcoidosis and therefore it is not a diagnosis of exclusion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gerriet42 (talk • contribs) 07:30, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Would ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Dyspraxia be good examples to include here? ME in particular has been very dififuclt to diagnose, which must cause some of the suspicion that it's not a real condition.--MartinUK (talk) 19:06, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Psychiatric diagnoses of exclusion?
The lede mentions that diagnoses of exclusion are more common in the psychiatric area, but all the examples are of more or less somatic diseases. Shouldn't there be examples of psychiatric diagnoses of exclusion? I don't know many examples, but PDD-NOS seems to fit the bill. We'd need a source for it of course; all I can find are web articles of relatively doubtful merit, eg. this. Sakkura (talk) 13:18, 1 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Added PDD-NOS. Still couldn't find a proper source, but it seems rather obvious. Sakkura (talk) 17:56, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

Schizophrenia
I don't think schizophrenia should be on the list and the citation is a broken link so I can't see what the justification for its inclusion is. So I shall articulate my line of reasoning: I think this article in general does not do a good job of nailing down the precise difference between a diagnosis of exclusion and simply having to perform some level of differential diagnosis (i.e. there is no pathognomonic sign, symptom, test result etc.) and I would argue that a diagnosis of exclusion is one where there are signs (etc.) that indicate its possibility yet no signs or constellations that are particularly suggestive of that illness as opposed to another. Yet if a mental health professional encounters a patient who is a socially withdrawn male in his early twenties who is a chain smoker that used to use cannabis as a teenager and is suffering from command hallucinations, bizarre delusions of persecution, thought blocking, thought insertion, thought broadcasting, flat affect, anhedonia, avolition, and alogia, then the diagnostic criteria that essentially consist of performing a differential diagnosis for schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, autism spectrum disorder, childhood-onset communication disorders, substance-induced psychosis, and psychosis related to a medical condition really become a matter of procedure rather than the principal diagnostic method: rather than the clinician concluding that it is schizophrenia because it is not any of the other things, they reckon it is schizophrenia and they rule out the other things to be sure. Anditres (talk) 18:16, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
 * I've fixed the link; the point being made in the article is that you need to exclude delirium and intoxication. Klbrain (talk) 15:25, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I suppose that we could make the distintion between diagnoses that require exclusion (of other conditions), and those that are diagnoses of exclusion, but when a line is drawn is difficult to be sure of! Klbrain (talk) 15:30, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Removing CFS from the list of examples
ME/CFS is no longer considered a diagnosis of exclusion. 66.253.183.211 (talk) 20:33, 10 June 2024 (UTC)