Christina Applegate is advocating for herself amid her ongoing health battle after learning she was misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
“For the physical self, I’m doing PT three times a week and gonna start the investigation now next week,” Applegate, 54, said on the Tuesday, October 20, episode of her and Jamie Lynn Sigler’s “MeSsy” podcast. “That’s kind of how new this all is, is that we haven’t even started the investigation. Because it was kind of left up to me to kind of figure it out.”
She continued, “I’m like, ‘I don’t know. How many specialists am I going to find for something I don’t even know what I’m looking for?’ That process is going to start.”
Applegate, who went public with her MS battle in 2021, shared on Tuesday that she had been misdiagnosed.
“[My doctor] came into my room and said, ‘Congratulations, you don’t have MS,’” Applegate recalled. “I was, like, not happy at all. Everybody else was so happy.”
Applegate and Sigler were joined for the episode by Dr. Marwa Kaisey, an associate professor with the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center department of neurology, who noted that misdiagnoses are “fairly common” because “we don’t have one single test for MS.”
“It’s not like we have something like a pregnancy test that says, ‘Yes, you have it. No, you don’t.’ It’s a list of criteria,” she continued. “Almost one in five of these people who’d been told they had MS, some for decades, didn’t actually have it. And a majority of them were on medication to treat their MS.”
Applegate became emotional during the episode, explaining that she was still struggling with symptoms amid her health battle.
“You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of the sudden I’m better,” she said. “I haven’t gotten better, Jamie! If anything, I’ve gotten worse. So I’m back at square one where I don’t know what’s going on with me. And that’s going to be an online investigation that my doctors are going to be getting into just to find out what has been going on since 2021, why did this happen?”
Applegate went on to note that she’s in a “state of shock” over the “mindf***” misdiagnosis. “It’s weird because I feel like I let everybody down,” she said. “It’s this weird feeling because I became this — you and I, the poster children for MS. And everything I was doing. I had a reason. I had a f***ing reason as to why my day sucked every day. And now I don’t have a reason and it’s very unnerving and it’s very confusing for me.”
