When Christina Applegate told her podcast audience on Oct. 20 that she does not have multiple sclerosis (MS), the internet did what it does when a famous person says something unexpected: it stopped. For five years since she first announced the diagnosis in 2021, Applegate has been one of the most visible faces of life with MS. Now, her doctor had told her it was a misdiagnosis, but her symptoms, she said, haven’t gone away. “Nothing magical happened when she said, ‘You don’t have MS,’” she told her co-host Jamie-Lynn Sigler, as CNN reported. It’s a devastating thing to hear, and I’m not here to minimize it. Applegate is still seriously ill without explanation, and her story deserves the attention it’s getting. But, reading the coverage, I kept thinking about the other side of this story. Applegate was told “yes” when the answer was “no.” Black women with MS have often had the opposite experience: delayed, dismissed, or told it was something else. That story isn’t new. It’s been documented in medical journals for years, in studies where women describe being disbelieved by the very people they went to for help. So, I want to ask the questions I can’t stop asking: why does it take a famous person’s misdiagnosis for us to talk about how often medicine gets it wrong, and why do the people it fails most often rarely get the headline?
Misdiagnosis is more common than most of us think. A 2024 meta-analysis in Multiple Sclerosis Journal found a pooled misdiagnosis rate of about 15%, with individual studies ranging from 5% to 41%, according to ABC News. Women were 2.1 times more likely to be misdiagnosed than men. There’s an important caveat: specialists quoted by Yahoo Health note that most people with MS are correctly diagnosed the first time, and the 15% to 20% figures come largely from patients who sought second opinions at MS centers. Part of the problem is that there’s no single test for MS, and symptoms like tingling, fatigue, and brain fog show up in many conditions, Dr. Marwa Kaisey of Cedars-Sinai told TODAY. Diagnosis, in other words, is a judgment call, and judgment calls depend on who is making them and whom they’re listening to.
For Black women, the documented pattern runs the other direction. MS was long described as a “Caucasian women’s disease,” a label that shaped who got tested and who got believed. In one study of Black women with MS, a recurring theme was “no one could believe I had MS,” with many women feeling their diagnosis had been delayed while their doctors first looked at conditions considered more typical for Black patients. A 2025 cross-sectional study found that Black patients with MS were more likely to wait at least six months after symptoms began to see a neurologist, and tended to have more disabling symptoms by the time they were diagnosed. Dr. Klineova, a neurologist, told Brain & Life that many young Black women she has treated who went to the emergency room were told they had minor nerve problems, and put off seeing a specialist until their symptoms worsened. And the assumption that MS is rare in Black women doesn’t hold up. Another neurologist told the magazine that studies suggest the risk is up to 47% higher in Black women than in white men or women.
This isn’t only an MS story. CDC data for 2024 put the maternal mortality rate for Black women at 44.8 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared with 14.2 for white women, Axios reported. KFF notes that pregnancy-related mortality is higher among Black women who completed college than among white women with the same level of education, which undercuts the idea that this gap is simply about money or schooling. Researchers point to a mix of social and economic factors, racism, and chronic stress; no one claims there’s a single cause. OB-GYN Nicole Rankins told Axios that closing the gap starts with health care workers recognizing their unconscious biases. The details differ, but a version of the same pattern keeps showing up: concerns are raised, concerns become underestimated, and the outcomes worsen.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: None of this research is secret. The studies on delayed MS diagnosis in Black women are in peer-reviewed journals, and the maternal mortality numbers come straight from the CDC. Yet, the conversation about misdiagnosis exploded this week because a famous actress with a podcast and millions of people already listening said it out loud. That isn’t Applegate’s fault, and it isn’t a reason to care about her story less. It’s a reminder that attention follows visibility, and visibility has never been distributed evenly. When a celebrity is misdiagnosed, it’s news. When Black women describe the same thing, it’s too often treated as a statistic instead of a warning.
I’m not a doctor, and nothing here is medical advice. But if there’s one takeaway from Applegate’s story, it’s that a diagnosis is a starting point, not a verdict. Her doctor’s reassessment after treatment didn’t improve her symptoms, which is a reminder that it’s worth saying something when something isn’t working. A few questions worth asking: What else could this be? Which tests led to this conclusion, and can I have the results? Should a specialist weigh in? If my symptoms aren’t improving, does this diagnosis still fit? Bringing someone with you to appointments and asking for your notes can help too. None of that is magic. But for people who have been told their concerns are minor, it’s a way of asking to be taken seriously.
Applegate’s story is a reminder that doctors can get it wrong. The research on Black women is a reminder of who tends to wait the longest for answers. Both deserve to be headlines. The question is why only one of them is.