Patient experiences and clinical cases relating to Functional Neurological Disorder.
Personal experiences of living with an FND diagnosis.
Maddie Aumann was diagnosed with FND before genetic testing identified a rare SCN9A disorder. Her mother, Christine Aumann, describes how the FND label continued to affect Maddie’s care even after that discovery, ultimately helping inspire Maddie’s Law.
Personal account of complex neurological and systemic symptoms following a tick bite, with a clinical diagnosis of FND made after extensive negative or inconclusive investigations. The author proposes an infectious origin involving Lyme disease and other tick-borne infections and reports improvement following targeted antibiotic treatment.
An 18-year-old developed severe neurological symptoms after a concussion, was diagnosed with FND after inconclusive testing, and later found to have tethered cord syndrome requiring surgery.
Miranda’s health collapsed almost overnight, progressing from difficulty walking to seizures, psychosis, and rapid neurological decline. Despite abnormal findings and worsening symptoms, she was quickly labelled with Functional Neurological Disorder, and further testing was repeatedly refused. Her story raises serious concerns about missed conditions like Autoimmune encephalitis and the risks of diagnostic overshadowing blocking proper care.
Email from a 21-year-old medical student in Kazakhstan sharing their detailed experience with neurological symptoms diagnosed as FND, highlighting objective signs of an organic lesion, diagnostic history, and concerns about misdiagnosis.
For the past seven years, my wife’s health has steadily declined, which forced me into research mode - diving deep into various medical fields through countless hours of studying medical journals, textbooks, clinical resources, and literature, as we were passed from specialist to specialist.
Real clinical cases documented in published medical case reports.
A man whose variable, distractible and inconsistent neurological findings contributed to a diagnosis of conversion disorder continued to deteriorate for years. After his death, neuropathology and genetic testing confirmed Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker syndrome, showing how genuine clinical observations can support the wrong diagnostic interpretation.
A 64-year-old woman was diagnosed with a functional neurological movement disorder after clinicians observed distractibility, variability and entrainment. Within weeks, worsening symptoms and newly abnormal EEG and MRI findings reopened the investigation, and a brain biopsy confirmed sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
A published case report documents a patient initially diagnosed with FND whose progressive neurological deterioration led to further investigation and an eventual diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP).
A 26-year-old postpartum woman presenting with headache and neurological symptoms was discharged with anxiety and possible conversion disorder. She returned the following morning unable to walk. MRI revealed a thalamic infarction caused by cerebral venous thrombosis. The case also raises a broader question: if later disease does not necessarily invalidate an FND diagnosis, how is FND misdiagnosis actually identified and counted?
A patient diagnosed with FND recovered completely after surgical repair of a CSF leak. Why did the diagnosis remain? This article explores what the case reveals about comorbidity, diagnostic reasoning, and the falsification problem in FND.
A critical look at a case of postoperative paralysis labelled as FND, questioning whether pre-existing neurological instability and predictive processing may better explain the presentation than a purely functional diagnosis.