An Update on Patrick Volkerding

Noryungi writes "Patrick Volkerding, the maintainer of Slackware Linux has posted an update on his health problems on the ChangeLog of Slackware-Current. Unfortunately, it seems his health is getting worse and not better... Again, if you know some specialist in viral infections, contact Patrick ASAP. Hang in there, Pat!" Our original story.

Comments

Best of luck

[Anonymous Coward]

I, like most of slashdot, send my well-wishes.

Re:Best of luck

[BoldAC]

Okay, I send my best wishes... but I am worried.

I'm a doctor at a teaching hospital so we see wierd stuff all the time. I'll give you my sideline quarterbacking of the situation.

First, you have a patient who is trying to diagnosis and treat his own condition. A good analogy would be a newbie blindly editing his/her registry. I know its the "hacker" way, but hacking your own body can be dangerous. It's difficult to reboot or reformat the body as a system.

Second, you can't have pulmonary "pops." If you pop a bleb, you develop a pneumothorax... and you are sick as poo. This can be seen on a chest X-ray and typically would need a chest tube to prevent respiratory failure.

He talks about going to Mayo... and multiple ERs. Doctor-shopping raises multiple red-flags.

His sedimentation rate (ESR) is normal. It is very, very difficult to have an infection or inflammatory process with a normal sed rate.

Obviously, I have not examined this guy. He might have a new disease that completely goes against science as we know it. But people come to us for rare medical problems all the time... we love it. When we find something rare, we jump around giving each other high-5s. We spend tons of research and government money trying to figure out these rare case. However...

I'm just not buying in this case.

Re:Best of luck

[vortimax]

>First, you have a patient who is trying to
>diagnosis and treat his own condition.

This is usually the only way to get something fixed these days. Most doctors are very resistant to doing anything that could be called diagnosis. Their answer to everything is usually to ask you a few questions, interrupt you after hearing the first sympton they can connect with some common malady, and then decree what's wrong with you. As in Patrick's case, it's common for the doctors to ignore facts which don't fit (after all, how could stupid patients possibly know anything about all that hard "doctor stuff").

Most doctors seems to diagnose everything I get as "something that's going around" and prescribe antibiotics. I usually have to do their research for them and then come back for another visit, demanding the specific tests needed to diagnose the problem (which sometimes requires moving to a more cooperative doctor), and then insist on proper treatment based on the test results.

Fortunately, many medical texts are available online which contain the information needed to self-diagnose. But you still need a competent doctor to perform or authorize tests and prescribe treatments.

Over the years I've found it very rare to meet doctors who actually take an interest in diagnosing an illness by using specific tests to determine the cause instead of just prescribing antibiotics. They are out there, however, and worth looking for. Just don't expect to find one easily. Most doctors seem to be lazy, disinterested, or simply not capable of diagnosing patients. Sturgeon's rule (90% of everything is crap) applies to the field of medicine as much as any other field.

When I find a doctor that resists doing tests that could result in a diagnosis, in favor of randomly prescribing common drugs, and who argues against "doctor shopping" when a doctor is obviously wrong, it raises major red flags for me as a patient and is a good indication that a better doctor is needed ASAP. I hope Patrick can find some competent doctors in time. They're rare.

Good luck Pat

[Gothmolly]

Pat is one of the heros of the Linux movement, like Donald Becker, or Andre Hedrick, people without whom running linux would be an impossible task. Pat, good luck, hang in there!

RTFM

[DarthBobo]

This fucking ridiculous.

If he is as sick as he says, _any_ physician would insist on having him hospitalized and having multiple consultants see him (notably, infectious disease and oncology.) He symptoms suggest a progressive disease that requires agressive intervention - and that doesn't mean trials of expensive antibiotics.

He has either failed to see a primary care physician, or he has refused appropriate treatment and admission to a hospital. In either case, as an educated, intelligent man he has made his own decision. Slashdot should not be contributing to his decline by enabling his poor decisions. He needs to be told flat out by his friends that they are not going to work with him until he agrees to admission and workup at a major teaching hospital (which, by the way, will have access to every antibiotic in the world.)

The problem with doctors...

[siskbc]

...is that he self-medicated for a long time. If he had gone to a doctor right from the start, he'd be probably fine by now. Seriously.

No, the problem is that he went to a doctor at the start, who told him nothing was wrong. He repeated that about 10 times. In the meantime, he tried to find out what was wrong with him because 1) he has more time than the GPs and crappy specialists he saw, 2) he cares more than them about his health, and 3) most doctors don't think creatively because they aren't trained to.

As someone who has had a hard-to-diagnose health problem, Patrick's course of action is the only one that works. You have to do your own research, and pester the hell out of doctors to get them to actually try to diagnose you. Otherwise, they either tell you nothing's wrong, or they refer you to someone else who repeats the whole process and refers you again.

Patrick didn't self medicate. He's just trying to get these damned doctors to take his condition seriously.