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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."
Interesting: while reading about her symptoms, Crohn's Disease was the first think that came to my mind. And no, I'm not a doctor. So what kind of doctors were seeing her? Veterinary ones?
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
I thought this was a joke when I first read it. Crohn's disease is actually quite a common ailment so I cant believe no doctor diagnosed this. Where did she get a sample of her own intestinal tissue? I mean seriously...
Do doctors only rely on pre-mashed medical condition patterns as a rotting knowledge to help patients?
I often wondered how it look like so difficult as a patient to get proper diagnosis and treatment most of the time. And this look so weired from a computer literate point of view.
At some point, animals tend to get better medicine.
Perhaps patients would benefit better treatments if doctors practiced more science than magic art.
Léa Gris
I've been struggling with lactose intolerance for a similar period of time and also had similar, unsatisfactory, experiences with doctors.
The one to diagnose it, finally, was me with a little help from Dr. Google.
My wife has made similar experiences with gynaecologists. Some were actually telling her that the pill had no side-effects. Unbelievable, really.
Also, some doctors she consulted and whom prescribed drugs would say that said drugs did not interfere with the pill, when, clearly stated in the package insert, they did.
It's called capitalism. Ain't got cash? Well we ain't got the answer. Gotta love it. Survival of the richest, litteraly. How did this benefit mankind?
Meh, I had to diagnose myself as well (Addison's disease) after 5 year of suffering... Constant low blood pressure, hyperkalemia and hypoglycemia, and no doctor ever even thought like "hey, maybe we should do some more tests". I had to friggin ask to test my cortisone levels, they didn't even bother.
"Yeah well, normal blood tests don't show nothing special, except those potassium and sugar values, but that's nothing to worry about." Not even when those values (elevated/reducted/...) were the same 5 years in a row.
Really, I've kinda lost my faith in the diagnostic abilities of a lot of doctors
this is what u get without basic health care, it's not something to marvel at it's something to cry about. it's sad that people can't just goto a doctor at a young age and just get better.
When my son was young he would get infections from time to time. Some doctors and nurses would tell us that panadol is a good way to get his temperature down, others would say that panadol can't do that. Seems like a pretty easy thing to test to me.
Years ago when I developed knee problems from cycling I took it to several doctors. One doctor who claimed to be a sports injury specialist told me to put a bandage on it and it should be okay. Eventually I went to a bike shop which caters to the racing crowd. They do a lot of static training there after hours. I paid them to fit my bike to me and bought extra gear to get the fit right. The owner recommended an osteopath he knew who rides bikes and understands the issues. The combination of the two fixed the problem. Doctors were worse than useless.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If your hypothesis is even remotely like what happened that's a rather interesting commentary on society. You see, many people have developed this attitude that you should never go to the doctor. It's not explicit. They implicitly avoid the doctor's because you have to stay healthy. In America diagnosis equals sick. So as long as you are undiagnosed you are "healthy" and can get health coverage. Should you get diagnosed as sick or with a persistent disease you will be harder to insure and have periods of your life as you move around the US or change jobs where you are not covered by health insurance. That's because pre-existing conditions are often not covered by US insurance so that means ... you can't have any problems for the first few months that you are at a new company.
Even though its supposed to be illegal employers can identify who has a pre-existing condition and encourage those people to leave the company to increase the company's overall healthiness and lower its bills. Small cumulative effects like that build up in people's decisions. Having a persistent condition that requires treatment means you life will be more expensive and troubled.
So our girl with the microscope just ensured she will be harder to employ, have a harder time keeping a job, and will pay more for all forms of insurance for the rest of her life. I could imagine that perhaps someone was trying to protect her from all that.
Yes, I've acknowledged that - as I said the pathologist will have been presented with many many samples, turned into slides, looking for a few, if any, granulomata, which are tiny in size. I even said "Now do you start to see why a pathologist may miss it?" It is very hard, if not impossible, to scan every single slide in its entirity, for a granuloma. Fortunately this girl found it, when the pathologist didn't. Props to her,
Not exactly. My stomach had been flipped from my belly into my chest. There it had crumbled my left lung and pushed aside my heart. What I did was losing some weight and the extra room it gave helped me use my right lung to pump up my left lung again. (capping my nose). Not only did new air get into my left lung, also blood started to flow better resulting in a very noticeble drop in blood tension. The bigger lung pushed my stomach back to my belly. Which by the way is an enormous sickening feeling that lasted about six hours. New MRI scans proved it worked leaving the specialists more than amazed any patient would do this at home without prior consulting. Anyway, the operation to stitch everything togeter went fine, and they wrote a report on it in a medical magazine.
Pubmed is free access? I am a scientist (cancer research to be specific). One of the students in the lab I work in got a chemical splashed into her eye. She was taken to emergency and there she was treated by a doctor who raved about this fantastic website he had found that would tell him what effect the chemical would have on the eye. Turned out that website was pubmed. You can possibly only appreciate the hilarity of that if you are in bio science. But for you non-bioscience people: pubmed is the single most used literature database. And this doctor thought he was very special for discovering it.
I survived a serious disease a few years ago IN SPITE of the specialists I had studying my case. You can't know the frustration of being told "oh, you just have stress" when your own immune system is destroying your nervous system, and being prescribed Valium. In the time that was wasted before I got the correct treatment, I forever lost my ability to walk. I no longer have any respect for doctors. If there isn't a bone sticking out, they don't have a clue.
There is a flaw in your reasoning... Having lots of money does not mean you have the -skill- to make money, nor does it mean you are smart or even particularly skilled. See "trust fund babies".
It can be difficult to diagnose. I had an ex who had it, and had been diagnosed for years. She went to a new doctor who ran some tests and they said they couldn't find any trace of Crohns, and tried to re-diagnose her with IBS. Apparently the signs are not persistent, so depending on when the doctors did the test, its possible they could have missed the inflamed tissue and ruled it out early on. Or, they could just be morons.
Yes. In fact, I know 3 people with Crohn's disease, and it is, in fact, difficult to diagnose. I realize 3 people doesn't make a study, but all 3 were undiagnosed for years, despite each having seen a veritable army of doctors. The problem is that symptom-wise Crohn's disease often looks like a lot of other stuff, like ulcerative colitis, dysteria (and other viruses), lactose intolerance, food allergies, various infections, etc. With the flare-ups as described, it goes like this:
Patient: I've had diarrhea and cramps for 2 weeks now.
Doctor: Huh. Probably an infection. Here, let's give you some antibiotics.
A couple of weeks later, everything is cleared up, doctor assumes that the antibiotic worked. The patient then gets another flare up, doctor think it's something else, lather, rinse and repeat.
(Disclaimer: my mother, my wife, and sister-in-law all have medical backgrounds, but I don't short of reading scientific articles generally geared at lay people, along with some professional journal articles. YMMV)
My blog
Well, it lets the doctor who ordered the biopsy off the hook, but it makes the pathologist look pretty inept.
Wonder how they missed it (granulomas are relatively "easy" to spot). During lectures from pathology they would always show slides and point out a million different things only visible to them!
;)
That said Crohn's disease is really nasty because it is a transmural (contrary to ulcerative collitis in which "only" the upper layer is inflamed) and can occur throughout the whole digestive tract (from mouth to anus...) Quite a lot of patients need repetitive surgery to remove inflamed intestine.
As other pointed out as well most of the symptoms are common which makes it a difficult to diagnose (cause you can't put every patient trough a endoscopy, for financial, patient well being and capacity reasons).
There are off course typical cases but most patients do not have the decency to stick to the symptoms they should have according to the text book
Frankly, I think self, or at least at home diagnosis, IS the future of health care. Med tech needs to be sold at the consumer level and incorporated into the daily hygienic routine, in a non intrusive way. The bathroom of the future will have diagnosed this problem. After you take your morning piss, or crap in in your space toilet, it will analyze the contents and report back any, uh, interesting findings, proposed causes, solutions, possibly give the option of scheduling an appointment with a doctor, etc.
Hell, doctors are ALREADY being giving PDAs with diagnosis software based on data mining techniques. Type in the list of symptoms, and let the program compare with a repository of data to kick out a diagnosis. I think we're heading to a point, probably still in the far future, where "doctors" in the traditional meaning are irrelevant. They will probably be needed to perform actual procedures, or to diagnose more complex sets of health issues, but for simple "analysis" of basic or common, health problems, machines in every home will be plenty sufficient, as well as add the benefits of early warning.
However there will probably be obstacles in the way of moving med tech to a consumer product for self diagnosis in home. Namely various doctors/medical associations that are looking out for their own interests, and busybody government buerocrats seeking to "protect" you from the possibility of self-misdiagnosis while actually protecting the profits of a somewhat marginalized profession.Similar to what we see happening in every industry where tech marginalizes former moneymakers...
Anyway, good for this girl!
Now make me a space toilet!
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
How does one obtain one's own intestine cells? Direct on the point answer please, thanks!
Pure FUD.
I live in a country with socialised medicine and it's funny, because we also have private medicine and insurances, but people with really bad diseases get sent to the public system because the privates refuse to spend money treating them. And they lack the equipment, anyway. It's expensive.
There was an expert system developed some time ago called Mycin. What made Mycin interesting is its high performance rate relative to other subject matter experts. In fact, to the extent to which this area's been pursued lately in academic circles (which is to say, not much; the current hot topics in AI are computer vision, emotion detection, embodied cognition, and robotics), the results have been similar. The expert systems produce results on par with, or superior to, experts in the field.
That said, there's strong pushback in this area from doctors, just as teachers and school administrators are typically opposed to intelligent tutoring systems despite their excellent outcomes. Integration with other systems and the user interface have been issues as well; academic software tends to be of the "stovepipe" variety. There's also a legitimate concern about overreliance on the technology.
It is worth noting, though, that the limited quality (in terms of sensitivity and specificity) of medical information means that the expert system actually needs to be relatively complex. You don't want the expert system to return thousands of equal probability diagnoses, or alternatively to leap to the wrong conclusion based on sparse data.
The Freelance Wizard
The answer was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schistosomiasis, which I contracted as a young child. It ruined my life, for sure. The trouble is, if you ask any doctor here in the US they will tell you it does not even exist here, only in west Africa and South America. I've never even been anywhere near there, or outside the country at the time at which I contracted it. If you have ever been labelled with IBS but have other symptoms as well then you might want to read the above wikipedia article.
Because the doctors are not aware of the disease, they do not diagnose it.
Because doctors do not diagnose it, they do not collect any statistics.
Because the disease is statistically insignificant, the medical schools do not teach much, if any, about it.
Therefore the doctors don't know about it.
Anyone see a problem with this situation?
What really hurts is that when it really started affecting my health my primary care physician at the time was an EXPERT in those diseases, and she just blew me off because it would bee too hard to think, or to send me for actual tests of some kind. You would never know her ineptitude by looking at her wall of certification she earned in medical school in west Africa. Of all doctors, including at least three infectious disease specialists, this one completely boggles my mind how she could have missed this diagnosis!
After 37+ years of damage it took my buying my own 1600x stereo microscope mounted with a CCD camera to collect some indisputable evidence, one day to use it, one doctor visit to present my case, three days just to find a source in the US to fill the prescription, and only 24 hours to actually cure it. The damage was done, and nothing can ever give me back my health, or a normal life for that matter. The real kicker is my dog gets that exact same 'cure' every month, but it took me three days to find a supplier for a 'human' prescription for the exact same drug. All I can say is at least my dog has someone that actually cares about his health!
According to the article her pathologist gave her the slides for the class project.
How the hell did she pull that off? I can't even get my dentist to photocopy the xrays of my teeth for me to take home.
Did you tell these useless doctors about the cycling?
I used to joke that if people gave their doctors the same quality of information as we used to get in our bug reports, they'd go home sicker than they went in - if they went home at all.
Then I was talking to a doctor and he said they do. Smoking is the thing they usually lie about.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Try searching for medical insurance won't pay treatment on google and let me know if any of the 21 million results make it clear to you why people would look to have a choice other than a for profit insurance company or paying out of pocket.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I thank god every time I go to my doctor. He's awesome. I met him because I needed a second opinion. I was developing carpal tunnel syndrome and my old doc wanted to operate, so I did the smart thing and got a second opinion. My current doctor was like "Take that brace off. Take one aspirin every morning and it will clear up within a week or two. Here's a strong analgesic to get it started. See your tendons are inflamed. The swelling causes the tendons to be sore because they are pushing out against the "guides" (he used normal person speak for me). This is a vicious cycle because this rubbing causes further inflammation. The aspirin will take the swelling down and allow the irritation to heal. You are definitely on your way to CTS, but you don't need an operation yet and it's preventable."
Within a week it was gone. He's been my doctor ever since.
He recommended that I start working out and biking to fix my chronic acid reflux problem, which also worked. My old doctor just put me on medication. I'm pain and completely medication free because of this guy. Not bad for someone my age.
Great doctors are out there. Hope you find one, listen, and do what they tell you...
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
How many patients routinely find the cause of their illness' before the medical profession does, like this woman did?
Another good question would be 'how many patients do ten minutes of googling and decide that they have some horrible disease when all they really have is a cold?'. My point is that this cuts both ways.
There's a reason that doctors use statistics to diagnose patients, it works the majority of the time. Where you get into problems is when people have a difficult to diagnose, chronic disease that isn't immediately life threatening. When you're at the doctor several times a year and several doctors aren't able to treat your condition, future doctors will often assume that you are a hypochondriac or an attention seeker. My college roommate lived with Chron's for almost 15 years of his life, until he finally got sick enough that he was admitted to the hospital, 24 hours later he had a correct diagnosis.
Agreed. I had chronic stomach issues for several years (throwing up, being unable to keep much down). I had doctors who would just treat it as if it were a stomach bug, or the flu, or acid reflux. I would feel better in a couple weeks, and continue to feel better for a couple months.
A few years into all of this, I spent a week being unable to really process any food and finally got sent to a G-I specialist. Apparently I had a Volvulous (sp? basically, one intestine had wrapped around another, causing blockage) and needed surgery NOW or I would probably die.
Please, doctors listen when a patient says "This keeps happening to me".
I put on my robe and wizard hat..
It would have proved interesting were she have had say tropic sprue [wikipedia.org] and you were to treat her with the immunosupressants.
I take a medication that's used to treat Crohn's disease (Enbrel). It's a shot i self-administer twice a week. I take it for severe plaque psoriasis. It's a freakin miracle drug. Without out, those spots you see on peoples' knees and elbows cover 50% of my skin severely limiting my mobility, lots of cracking and bleeding. During a flair, it feels like a second degree burn... on 50% of your body. And it's rather disfiguring. Anyway, while it technically is an immunosupressant, I have virtually no side-effects. I don't even get sick more often. And I don't have an increase in infections of any kind. It's a tumor necrotizing factor inhibitor, so I think it's fairly targeted. Based on my experience, I doubt it's dropping my white blood cell counts much. It wouldn't be such a terrible drug to try out, although it is expensive and takes a while to start working, at least with psoriasis.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
I don't find this surprising at all. Doctor's offices are assembly lines these days. A convenient good for a convenient number. Real life isn't like House -- unless you're a senator, successful diagnosis of obscure problems is unlikely, and probably prohibitively expensive for the patient, even with insurance.
It would be in our favor to become more educated about how this complicated machine called the body works. I'm not suggesting bizarre treatments only available in third world countries, but a more complete understanding of cause and effect.
For instance, the most common treatment for back pain is "weaponized" muscle relaxers and pain killers, commonly leading to hopeless addiction. I know of at least two cases (one of them my own) where the true cause of the pain was due to ergonomic issues, and changes in the environment accompanied by proper exercise solved the issue. Doctors are not likely to tell you that. I don't even believe it's something nefarious like kickbacks from the drug companies. It's simply because giving you a prescription frees up an examining room faster than trying to find a cause.
And then, there is the expense. I had an ailment that was costing me $400 a month in office visits, lab tests and drugs, after insurance. At some point I realized that I wasn't getting $400 worth of relief, and just stopped going. A little research produced alternates that provided 90% of the effect for 5% of the cost.
We don't have their training, but we do have a much higher regard for our own health than do most doctors, and access via libraries and the net to most of their information. The body is just another machine -- although a very complicated one -- and can be understood by an educated person, at least partially, via research.
Mind you, if I need surgery I'm going to the hospital. I'm not an idiot. But I stopped taking steroids for eczema, for instance, and switched to Bag Balm, available at the feed store at negligible cost. Works great.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
An anecdote from my AP anatomy class - we were testing blood types on our own blood, when a girl discovered her blood was AB-. Struck her as odd considering her parents both had the A+ bloodtype. She went home, confronted her parents, and promptly found out she was adopted. The teacher doesn't allow students to test their own blood anymore.
He wouldn't refer me for an EEG because he didn't believe a word I was saying. I had to try for years just to get referred to a specialist, and then wait 8 months because neurologists are just REALLY busy.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
> The kicker? A physical therapist diagnosed my problem
Which was?
While a college student, my brother went from doctor to doctor for six months for intestinal and stomach problems. Nobody could figure it out.
Eventually he figured it out. He was drinking the equivalent of 2 two-liters of Coke a day.
I find it hard to believe physicians wouldn't ask what you eat on a regular basis when having reports of long-term gastrointestinal issues.
On the other hand, if you're one such doctor, add drinking waaaaaaay too much pop as something to check in the first round of diagnosis, especially of younger people.
Hehe, two 2-liters' worth a day. Would make a good House case.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.