4 Celebrities Who Publicly Suffered Medical Misdiagnoses

Stars, they're just like us. That means they're not immune to health scares and even misdiagnoses — all in the glare of the intense public spotlight. Unfortunately, however, it's that same celebrity status that sometimes causes the misdiagnosis in the first place. 

Enter: "VIP syndrome" — a term coined to describe a physician's tendency to get especially nervous while treating celebs, ultimately leading them to make significant, and sometimes even life-threatening mistakes. "When we're treating celebrities we have to go beyond our comfort zone. Celebrities demand much more than the average person and rightly so because they are in front of cameras and on the red carpet. But you have to know your limits. If you mess up, you have a problem," Beverly Hills dentist Anthony Mobasser confessed to The Guardian about the pitfalls of treating A-list patients.

According to Dr. Neil Wenger, professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine and chair of the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center Ethics Committee, it all boils down to doctors treating their celebrity status patients differently. "VIPs may receive bad care because they are not treated according to the usual standards," Wenger told UCLA Health in October 2020. Sadly, celebs like Kelly Clarkson, Selma Blair, Oprah Winfrey, and Olivia Williams are all too familiar with that particular style of special star treatment and the negative outcomes that come with it. 

On the morning of the 2006 Grammy Awards, Kelly Clarkson received a call from her physician that no one ever wants to get. "I was told that morning that I had cancerous results for something," she revealed during an appearance on Billboard's "Pop Shop" podcast (via Self). 

Sadly, her big win at the awards event that night was overshadowed by the disturbing health news she had received earlier. "When I won, I thought, 'Oh, my God. This is like God giving me one more thing before something horrible happens,'" she recalled about the surreal moment she accepted the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, all while contemplating a cancer diagnosis.

It wasn't until the next day, however, that she fielded another call from the doctor with a much better prognosis: she had been misdiagnosed. "It was kind of the worst/greatest day. And the next day was also the worst/greatest day because I wanted to punch someone," Clarkson revealed. "I was like, 'Who mixes up results? Why wouldn't you test again?'"

Selma Blair knows a thing or two about being misdiagnosed. While the actor was officially diagnosed with "relapsing limiting multiple sclerosis" in August 2018, she believes she suffered from the disease for much longer. "I probably had juvenile MS as my first optical neuritis was when I was about seven, which left me with a lazy eye from nerve damage. But there were a lot of things missed my whole life," she said at the Flow Space Women's Health Summit in October 2025 (via Variety). According to Blair, growing up, she suffered from fevers, pain, and even "endless, bone-crushing fatigue," but her complaints to physicians went largely ignored. "My mom would say, 'Why can't you give her an MRI?' And they're like, 'Oh, she doesn't need it. She's probably getting her period,'" Blair recalled. 

Sadly, multiple sclerosis is one of many health conditions that are commonly misdiagnosed. According to Cedars-Sinai neurologist Marwa Kaisey, M.D., diagnosing multiple sclerosis can be very challenging. "A big problem in MS is we have a lot of tools that detect everyone who may have MS but also lump in people with other conditions that are not MS," she explained (via Cedars-Sinai). "We don't yet have tools that will identify only MS. We have sensitive markers but not specific markers to distinguish MS from other diagnoses," added Kaisey.

Oprah Winfrey went for years thinking there was something wrong with her heart, only to be eventually diagnosed with Hashimoto's disease. "Let me tell you, if ever you're going to use your celebrity status, you want to use it when it comes to a medical emergency. Forget the restaurants, forget the free gifts. All the other attention you get for being a person who's known in the world doesn't even compare to what it means to have all eyes on you when something goes wrong," Winfrey told the Los Angeles Times in 2022.

According to Winfrey, however, it was that same star power that actually led to her misdiagnosis. "I remember going back to one doctor who had actually given me an angiogram and I said, it wasn't a heart problem, it was a thyroid problem. And she said, 'What was I gonna do? You're Oprah Winfrey, and I wasn't going to have you die on me without having done everything I thought I could do,'" Winfrey recalled. Is that what happens when the so-called "Oprah Effect" collides with "VIP syndrome"? Scary, indeed.

Actor Olivia Williams was misdiagnosed with lupus, irritable bowel syndrome, and even perimenopause before she ultimately received her true diagnosis: a rare neuroendocrine cancer in her pancreas that had already spread to her liver. "I was thinking of my dear friend [the actor] Tom Beard, who had a backache and everyone said, 'I've got this great chiropractor/osteopath/tiger balm that will help,' and he was dead [aged 50] within a few months because the backache was pancreatic cancer. So I thought, 'I'm done,'" she told The Times in 2019.

Eventually, however, the feeling of sheer terror gave way to righteous anger. "If someone had f***ing well diagnosed me in the four years I'd been saying I was ill, when they told me I was menopausal or had irritable bowel syndrome or [was] crazy — I used that word advisedly because one doctor referred me for a psychiatric assessment — then one operation possibly could have cleared the whole thing and I could describe myself as cancer-free, which I cannot now ever be," she lamented to The Times in April 2025.

Now, Williams spends much of her time serving as an ambassador for Pancreatic Cancer UK and fiercely advocating for an inexpensive lab test that has the power to detect pancreatic cancer during the early stages. "It's too late for me ... This is where I get emotional but I'm not looking for sympathy, I'm looking for a cheap, early test," she declared.