[y-c-o-m-b]

Thanks for the information. I've been diagnosed with seronegative inflammatory arthritis myself, so I understand that the blood tests are not perfect; and "rule out" was used loosely to mean "unlikely to have". All of which is not really relevant to my point. My point was that health practitioners have become too comfortable with using anxiety (without evidence) to brush off patient concerns instead of utilizing cheap diagnostic tests to aide in the exploratory process of diagnosing a patient accurately.

In the case of my wife, once both blood tests came back positive, she was properly referred to a rheumatologist to continue monitoring her symptoms and their progression. That is how the healthcare system is supposed to work. Run tests, if it comes back positive, keep investigating with the right specialists that are more experienced in the area, then continue to look for signals that a diagnosis is accurate. Not this hand-wavy speculation with lack of evidence we experienced early on. Now that she has started to develop rheumatoid nodules, it's becoming more accepted by her healthcare team that this is rheumatoid arthritis.