Jon Stone
Consultant neurologist and first author of the 2005 systematic review of misdiagnosis of conversion symptoms and hysteria.
Who they are
The 2005 BMJ review lists Stone as a consultant neurologist in the School of Molecular and Clinical Medicine, University of Edinburgh. With six colleagues, he gathered 27 studies covering 1,466 adults with motor or sensory symptoms that no disease explained, followed for a median of five years.
The misdiagnosis rate fell from 29 per cent for diagnoses made in the 1950s to 17 per cent in the 1960s and 4 per cent from the 1970s onwards. The authors judged that the fall probably reflected better study design rather than the arrival of brain scanning, and the decline held regardless of patients' age and sex. The review also records E. Slater's 1965 follow-up, in which 32 of the 97 patients traced had been misdiagnosed.
Key papers
Stone, J., Smyth, R., Carson, A., Lewis, S., Prescott, R., Warlow, C., & Sharpe, M. (2005). "Systematic review of misdiagnosis of conversion symptoms and 'hysteria'." BMJ, 331(7523), 989. doi:10.1136/bmj.38628.466898.55.
Key ideas
In studies since 1970, a diagnosis of unexplained motor or sensory symptoms has usually held on follow-up. See Hysteria.
Sources
- Stone and colleagues (2005), abstract read, and full text consulted for the table entry on Slater (1965) and the author line, 13 October 2026.