False Diagnosis of Cystic Fibrosis-Reply

In his letter, Dr Feldman has expressed further thoughts about the difficulty of undoing the diagnosis of a chronic disease such as cystic fibrosis presented in my article. 1 The focus of my article was that making a diagnosis (and its undoing when not correct) is a complex event, with significant alteration in the family perception of the child from normality. For some families, change of the diagnosis back to normality was not simple to easily turn around. What Dr Feldman opens up is the important question of additional factors that may participate in the resistance to change in some families. In his book, The Somatizing Disorders: Illness as a Way of Life, 2 Ford indicates that there are a variety of mechanisms that may be somatizing components in the illnesses of patients. He has listed a spectrum of phenomenology such as hysteria, hypochondriasis, malingering, factitious diseases, Munchausen