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Meet Web Hypochondriacs
prostoalex writes "When Jerome K. Jerome in 1889 described going to the British Museum to read medical encyclopedia and subsequently finding symptoms of almost all diseases in his body, he didn't realize the problem would exacerbate more than a century later. Web hypochondriacs are calling up doctors with requests for prescriptions for all sorts of diseases, since they discovered some similar symptoms on the Web. Wall Street Journal quotes a doctor: 'My impression is that people believe more of what they read than what I tell them. It seems that traditional Western medicine based on scientific evidence is less and less trusted by the general public. Meanwhile, some dubious theory from the Internet will be swallowed hook, line and sinker nine times out of 10.' "
It's nice to have the information researchable, so that you can get more information than what your doctor tells you. I've recently started suffering from eczema outbreaks, followed by a couple of nasty infections over the past year. I've seen several GPs, a couple of dermatologists, and an infectious disease specialist for the infection that keeps popping up all over my legs. Aside from the antibiotics, the things I've read about eczema on the web have helped me more than the vague advice given by the family doctors and dermatologists.
Doctors (their mistakes) are the 3rd leading cause of death in the USA.
- Leading-Cause-of-Death-in-the-US.htm
http://www.healingdaily.com/Doctors-Are-The-Third
This article is a little extreme. Almost half are due to unforseeable drug effects. But still, a good reason to doubt your doctor.
FreeBSD: The Power to Serve!
I have been suffering with some pretty fucking bad digestion problems all my life. I have the hershey squirts alot and real bad cramps in my stomach. I went to the gastrointestinal doctor here in my home town for a endoscopy and colonoscopy. He diagnosed me with IBS syndrome and sent me on my marry way saying it was just a nervous stomach. After suffering for 4 more years of that crap I decided to try and figure out what the hell was wrong with me. I googled my symptoms and found my symptoms closely related to Celiacs Disease...Almost identical in everyway to the people with Celiacs of what they described. I went to another doctor the week after reading the Celiacs website and was diagnosed after another biopsy as having Celiacs. Only after using the web to help me find out my symptoms was I actually diagnosed properly. Google saved my bowels from a lifelong of shitting and pain :/
Well, the simple reason is that people don't trust their physicians anymore. Back in the Elder Days(tm) of Marcus Welby and so on, doctors took an interest in the health of their patients. A relationship was built over time. Finally, when the doc said, "You know, you need to go in and have surgery for this", a patient would do so without thinking twice because of the relationship and the longstanding trust between them.
Now, due to the way that doctors have to practice medicine (if they don't want to lose their shirts), they don't have a choice. 15 minutes in and out. No time to get to know their patients, no time to listen to the little old lady that just needs someone to talk to, no time to do anything but write a prescription and go on to the next patient. Now, when a doctor says, "That article on the internet is full of crap, you need surgery," people ask, "Why should I trust you? I don't know you."
If that doctor REALLY wants to know why people would believe an apocryphal story on the internet rather than him, he needs to look at the type of medicine he's practicing.
Note: This is not to blame him. Generally, with the reimbursement rates he's getting from the insurance plans with which he is signed, he is very limited in the amount of time he can spend with a patient. But the point remains: Speaking for myself, if someone wants to practice medicine on me, I have to trust them first. They've got lots of patients, but I only have one body. And the piece of paper on the wall saying M.D. only goes so far in building that trust.
Karma: Chameleon - mostly influenced by bad '80s New Wave music
Maybe if the American Medical Association and its industry didn't keep prices artificially inflated by restricting the supply of doctors, while demand explodes, doctors would be seen as respected members of the community, rather than inaccessible luxuries.
I was in the pre-med track for 10 years, starting in junior high school, and the #1 lesson for everyone is that the system is designed to "weed out" most of the people who want to become doctors. The weeding isn't done on the basis of one's compassion, or one's committment to medical science, or even to one's skill at medical practice. In fact, those essential criteria aren't even in the game until college, or even med school. Along the way, it's just pure competition, mostly measuring how much abuse people will stand, from the program and from each other, before they quit. The system lets people study subjects that get relatively easier grades than do sciences, so they are more competitive numerically. In fact, practically everything that aspiring doctors must do to get into med school selects for people who just want to make a lot of money, are indifferent to the suffering of others (or who relish it), who discard curiosity and compassion in favor of absolute focus on the bottom line: protecting their time and money from any threat, including patients.
Sure, doctors have to deal with insurance (patient and malpractice, at each end) and other dehumanizing bureaucracies when they start to practice. But by then they're in the doctor supply, so it's only the prospect of that that inhibits "people people" from staying in the game. Not only does the med school track select for people ill suited to be "caregivers" (rather than mechanics or drug pushers), it just artificially reduces the supply of people trained to help other people's medical conditions. And of course our high-stress, high-pollution, bad-diet lives create ever more medical problems to treat. The combination supply/demand problem means not enough doctors to treat too many patients, driving up prices, and driving a wedge between the people who need some of the utmost intimacy to succeed in their relationship.
Doctors make a lot of money. Pharma and insurance companies make even more. It's practically all profit: the costs of running a doctor's practice are large only when counting their insurance, which is of course driven up by the supply/demand crisis. We should extract enough of those profits, especially from insurance and pharma companies, to double or triple the number of doctors. We should expand medical schools across the country. Require the top 20% of schools, which depend on public subsidies for their research (which they then sell for profit), to double the number of graduates they produce. We have at least that many people who want to be doctors, including foreigners who need retraining/recertification, that could change the supply picture within 5-10 years. And we should require every med student who receives government subsidies to relocate to an underserved community for at least as long as they were paid to go to school - usually at least 7 years. If they're going to cash in on socialist financing of their careers, the people should get what we pay for: more doctors for more people, not more golfers at Boston golf courses.
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make install -not war
2. Don't be "TOO CLEAN."
Just a little appendum, always wash your hands after using the bathroom including between your fingers, and up to your elbows after no. 2. Also, do use the anti-bacterial soap when you ARE sick, it will work better if you didn't use it before you were sick.
It's not because not doing it is gross, nor is it for keeping you healthy, it is for the health of the people you interact with. Hand and bandage washing is what extended lifespan in the 19th and early 20th century. It has had an impact comparable to the discovery of anti-biotics in the mid-20th century.
Oh, a bit offtopic, wash your fruit and veggies with a mild solution of soap, the soap removes waxy anti-fungals and anti-insect poisons. The poisons won't kill you (well they shouldn't), but the fruits will taste better. The poisons have a bitter taste, most noticable on sweets such as apples and strawberries.