Srinagar, May 20 -- He was only twenty. Tall, soft-spoken, and worn out from months of back pain that wouldn't go away.

He had already seen doctors, taken painkillers, undergone surgery on his spine. But when he walked into our cancer hospital in Kashmir, everything about him said something deeper was wrong.

We ran tests. He had bone metastases. Cancer, advanced. It had likely been there all along, silently growing while everyone was focused on the wrong problem.

He died shortly after.

There was nothing more we could do by the time he reached us. And what makes it harder to live with is that his story is not rare.

In just two weeks around that time, I saw five more patients who were misdiagnosed or diagnosed too late. The signs were ...