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Teen Diagnoses Her Own Disease In Science Class
18-year-old Jessica Terry suffered from stomach pain, diarrhea, vomiting and fever for eight years. She often missed school and her doctors were unable to figure out the cause of her sickness. Then one day in January someone was finally figured out what was wrong with Jessica. That person was her. While looking under a microscope at slides of her own intestinal tissue in her AP science class, Jessica noticed an area of inflamed tissue called a granuloma, which is an indication of Crohn's disease. "It's weird I had to solve my own medical problem," Terry told CNN affiliate KOMO in Seattle, Washington. "There were just no answers anywhere. ... I was always sick."
If you go to "My Electronic MD (dot com)", tell it you're a female, and give it the symptoms "chronic diarrhea" and "fever," Crohn's Disease is the first of three things to pop up, along with Ulcerative Colitis and Infectious Colitis.
Of course, anyone can diagnose him or herself with a computer. It's encouraging that this young woman did it with a microscope.
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In a year's time I will be a doctor, and have just spent a year learning about pathology, so I thought I'd put my view forward. The interesting thing about Crohn's disease, in contrast to the other big type of inflammatory bowel disease (Ulcerative colitis) is that it is characterised by skip lesions. The disease is not confluent over the entire gut, in fact it can be anywhere from mouth to anus, in small patches. Now do you start to see why a pathologist may miss it? They will have taken many specimens from the girl's GI tract, and if this is the only sample with a granuloma, then it's not too unforgiveable that a patch of cells only around 30 cells-wide is miss. Yes, it sucks, but pathology is actually a fairly bloody hard speciality, with an very vigorous set of examinations, at least in the UK, so don't imply that these pathologists don't know what Crohn's is. Life isn't black and white, and medicine is just the same.
Maybe you guys instantly thought Crohn's, but there are plenty of other rarer diseases it could have been. Without a positive biopsy it would have been incredibly immoral to slap a Crohn's diagnosis on this girl and medicated her for it. It would have proved interesting were she have had say tropic sprue and you were to treat her with the immunosupressants.
She obviously just requested her own tissues, RTFA
"she was looking under the microscope at slides of her own intestinal tissue -- slides her pathologist had said were completely normal"
True but most rich people didn't inherit their wealth (http://www.smartmoney.com/spending/rip-offs/10-things-millionaires-wont-tell-you-23697/ "or take the most common path: running your own business. That's how half of all millionaires made their money, according to the AmEx/Harrison survey. About a third had a professional practice or worked in the corporate world; only 3 percent inherited their wealth.").
According to the article her pathologist gave her the slides for the class project.
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Slightly offtopic rant: IAAP (I Am A Physician), and we have to practice statistical medicine. But first and foremost, we have to listen to our patients. A good story beats statistics 9 times out of 10. But that means we get burnt 10 percent of the time. The patient population understands that. The health care industry understands that.
There's the old saying, "If you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, not zebras". If you want to practice medicine in a different way, go for it.
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