[user104658]

There is a secondary issue I think here of people just having a general poor understanding of health-related things and fully putting their trust in medical services rather than having a basic knowledge of their own body - the lady in the example given wouldn't have panicked and would have known it was an error if she had a basic understanding of the (IMO fairly obvious?) fact that you couldn't find out someone has lung cancer from a mole biopsy and a smear test .