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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."
...FIRST person do this?
...but can't really say which of the multiple personalities established the diagnose. Does this still count as "self-diagnose"?
Intellectual Property: an immaterial non-entity, most fiercely contended by those with no proper intellect to speak of.
Crohn's disease is pretty common, so how come it wasn't diagnosed? The idiot medicos just pocketed the money for tests, hospital stays, appointments, medical certs etc for 8 years while the girl suffered? Hmmm. Come to think of it I'm not that surprised. There are far more quacks out there than decent doctors in my experience.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
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!!
The story points out how our health care system is like the Geek Squad: poor troubleshooting. In the end the client has to figure out their problem.
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...
I diagnoezd my own disleksya at skool yeers ago. Since zen I'v goten a lott beter.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
For eight years her doctors were unable to diagnose Crohn's Disease? Shit, that's appalling. It's not exactly an obscure condition requiring House MD's staggering intellect, is it? It's been known about for at least a century, and while it's known to be difficult to diagnose with certainty, you'd think someone would have considered it...
Still, kudos to her.
Meta will eat itself
While looking under a microscope at slides of her own intestinal tissue in her AP science class
Ken
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
The original CNN story mentions that sometimes a fresh pair of eyes can spot something that the first pair didn't see. Coders and authors will be familiar with the idea. Sometimes you've looked over something and worked on it so much that you can no longer analyse it from the beginning, and it takes someone else to verify one's work. That's why nurses aren't allowed to dispense medicine unless they get another nurse to check that they have selected the right medicine and the right dose and the right patient. Also, the fact that this patient had a vested interest in making the diagnosis means that she would have examined the slide thoroughly. (Doctor) Richard Cavell
That it took them eight years to (fail to) diagnose something like this almost sounds like malpractice.
Get a new doctor, kid, you deserve better.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Don't send a professional to do a teen girls job ?
... if she now gets sued for "stealing" from "Private Doctor Association of America" (I'm sure there is one) by diagnosing her own self and not by paying a doctor to do it? Even though she did visit a pathologist.
Given the choise between Hitler and RIAA/MPAA I'd go for the first one - at least he knew when to shoot himself.
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.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
I have a lot of friends that have Celiac's disease, IBS, and/or Crohn's disease and the lack of medical personnel that know about these diseases is stunning. Especially Celiac's disease. It's an issue and as the prominence of these illnesses increases, more medical personnel will be educated about them which is good but right now, people with real issues, pain, and discomfort will continue to be misdiagnosed. I have one friend that found the 1 doctor in town that actually knew about Celiac's and another friend whose wife is having severe GI issues and the doctor has never even heard of Celiac's. It's a problem and we have to rely on the doctors to have the initiative to stay up to date on the current medical research.
The only news here is that until her age nobody had imagined it was Crohn's disease. It is a pretty common disease!
Yeah it happens. My 14 year old nephew has fungal meningitis. You expect that to happen if you have a suppressed immune system due to age or disease. In his case there just isn't a reason.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
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.
well its a lot cheaper than going to a doctor. besides if that was crone's wouldn't she have an ulcer if that was going on for 8 years?
Its not my fault, someone put a wall in my way.
survival of the richest means those with the ability to earn more could reproduce more and dominate the gene pool.
- except they don't
for questions-- see the first 15 minutes of "idiocracy"
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
With the developing of technology and Internet more and more people can diagnose their problems quicker.
When I was bitten by a tick I diagnosed borreliosis before going to the doctor, by just browsing the Internet. When I visited the doctor I already knew everything I had to do to cure it, still it was nice to get a professional confirmation.
Get used to it, the more you know, the better you can help yourself.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
It only counts as self-diagnosis when one of your personalities is biopsying your brain tissue. Let us know how that works out for you.
John
Maybe that will teach them to take their patients more seriously.
Never having had any medical schooling but with a little engineering background I made some changes to the protocol for the operation
Sentences like this usually have "duct tape" somewhere in them.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I live in Australia. Not a 3rd world country, or so we like to think. The standard of medical care here has been on the decline for a long time. I have seen some of it first hand. I won't repeat my first hand accounts here again because the last time I did I got called a liar.
That's not to say there are no good doctors and that no one cares. They're just few and far between working under a system starved of resources. Wose, the medical profession tends to work against the patient - if you self diagnose you're thought of as a crackpot. As if giving a damn about your own well being makes you a hypochondriac. I fear it's only going to get worse.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
When my daughter first started school - many years ago - she caught impetigo. Now, I had had impetigo as a child myself, but I had completely forgotten the symptoms. All I knew was that my daughter had acquired some kind of skin disease, and that it was spreading.
I took her to our local GP who actually admitted that he didn't know what it was, BUT STIIL PRESCRIBED a topical steroidal cream (which did absolutely nothing to cure the problem). A week later, with even more spreading, I returned to the same doctor, and he again admitted he didn't know what it was, and this time prescribed some kind of internal anti-biotic. At that point I asked him, If you don't know what it is, WTF are you doing prescribing medication, and why don't you recommend a specialist. At which point I took my daughter by the hand and walked out the door.
The next morning I was sitting in another GPs office, waiting for him to arrive, and as he walked in the door, he took one look at my daughter, whom he had never met before, and said, "Oh, you poor little girl, you've got impetigo, well, let's get you looked at, and we get that cleared up in a jiffy."
Moral of the story: most diseases are actually well known - if you find a competent doctor. Unfortunately, most doctors are incompetent. Impetigo is an amazingly common problem especially for children of primary school age. For any GP to not have recognized the symptoms is simply an indictment of the complete lack of competence.
As long as the medical community continues to hide the fact that 90% of their job is to memorize symptoms, and accept payola from pharma companies for generating prescriptions , and prescribe medication unnecessarily I will continue to treat them like scum sucking lawyers, used car salesman.
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
A lot of people are wondering why it took so long to diagnose. Well I have Crohns, diagnosed 4 years ago, even though I'm sure now I've had it since childhood. Growing up I thought that's just how my body worked. I thought I was just a little different than other people in that I had to urgently go to the bathroom a lot, And the painful cramping I thought was from my diet that I was constantly trying to change around to avoid problems. It can be an embarrassing subject to talk about, and if you had it since a child you don't know any better so I'm sure many people don't even talk about it to a doctor until it's an emergency. I never brought it up to doctors and just lived with it until 4 years ago when I went to the ER in just awful pain. Part of my colon was so damaged they removed about 20cm of it. And let me tell you bowel surgery is hell. The pain killers worked great but they take you off of them quickly because they also slow down the digestive system which they want to get back running again. I remember the first time they got me up to walk I took about 4 steps and had to give up. Now I'm managing well, can't complain.
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"
Let me guess, her body has trouble performing its repeating functions on a regular schedule?
This is a perfect example of why we don't need government run health care. People are just lazy whiners expecting everything to be done for them. With a little bit of effort, you can set up a lab in your house. And we have the Internet now; you can look up any rare disease. Hell, you can even become a doctor yourself and make a profit from the other lazy asses who aren't willing to get off their couches and be as ambitious as you.
This is not at all surprising to me, although most people would look at me funny for saying so.
If you are:
1. Smart (she is in AP science class)
2. Motivated (you are if you have an illness - it sucks; this is powerful and sustaining motivation)
3. Can spend as many hours of your spare time as it takes. This could be 10-1000+ hours.
4. Are willing to experiment.
5. Live in the internet age...
You can often diagnose and solve your own problems.
The key is to realize that:
1. The info is out there on the internet... somewhere. Probably on a forum, newsgroup post, whatever. (Chances are very high that someone has the exact same problem as you, and has written about it. You just have to figure out what combination of words are on that page and not on others.)
2. Although the signal to noise ratio is not great, if you are smart enough you will eventually learn to filter the noise and retain signal.
3. You may go down a wrong path, but since you are doing a type of extensive depth first search (but since you give up on non-promising leads by using your intelligence, you will eventually hit all the breadth), the search will start to approximate exhaustive.
4. In combination with 3, because you are experimenting, you learn when to curtail one of your search lines and try another.
5. Because you are smart, you will learn when one of your search lines fails but yields a clue to success, and because you are persistent you will get closer to a solution.
Thus, an exhaustive search will very often find the answer. The key enabler of all this, the "intelligence multiplier", is the internet.
Contrast this with a typical expert, such as a doctor. A doctor has 20 minutes to diagnose your problem, and has to remember something he studied for maybe half a day twenty years ago (if at all), in combination with the limited number of patients he has has both seen and successfully diagnosed in his life (compared to the vast collective experience of the internet). He can bill another N clients $$$ for another 20 minutes, or he can research your problem in his spare time. Guess what he usually does? He didn't make it through 90+ hours of internships etc. for the fun of it or to "help people" (maybe 1 in 100). He has student loans to pay off, a current model BMW, a trophy wife or girlfriend, a house in the best suburb, expensive wines to drink, classmates to impress at the reunion, and he has to start at age 30 or so.
And if you get a second opinion from someone who DOES diagnose your problem, does he get the feedback? Does he see your medical records from your new doctor? Usually not.
Another thing to realize with doctors is that many (of course, not all) of the people who go into medicine are not natural problem solvers. They are reasonably smart people who have good memories, good English skills, can cram well, and want the lifestyle that goes with being a doctor. A natural engineer by contrast, is better at diagnosis - figuring out what is wrong and fixing it. But often a good engineer will want to do engineering and not medicine. Note that I'm not saying that great doctors aren't out there. They are. But even the best doctors don't have expertise in all areas.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
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.
While looking under a microscope at slides of her own intestinal tissue
Unfortunately, her scientific career was short-lived because she was thrown out of school after she had actually obtained the sample of her own intestinal tissue in class.
WTF!? Her symptoms, along with the EIGHT YEARS part had me thinking "Crohn's?" before I even finished the summary. And here are doctors, that had tissue samples, that couldn't diagnose it? The girl gets kudos, but the doctors should turn in their license before they end up in a malpractice suit... Granted, there are half a million conditions that could match those simple symptoms, but Crohn's should have been high on the suspicion list after 2 years and conditions didn't appear to get better. And yet they had tissue samples and STILL couldn't figure it out!? Was she outsourcing her medical advice to a call center in India or something!?
But now that she HAS figured it out... here's to hoping she lives in a compassionate state that allows medical marijuana. Otherwise she'll be stuck with the same incompetent doctors that will have nothing else to do but prescribe her drugs that will practically leave her nonfunctional, and will occasionally perform surgery when the going gets bad, despite the medication.
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.
Is this what they mean by "Private Health Care"?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Few will be eager to perform self-administered colonoscopies....
Hope is the currency of fools
how come it wasn't diagnosed?
We don't have enough information to know why it wasn't diagnosed. It said that she had the symptoms for 8 years, but it doesn't say how many doctors she saw about them, or where or when. This could just as easily be a communications breakdown as much as a problem with quack doctors; if she changed doctors over the 8 years (which is a common patient reaction when they have undiagnosed problems) then the records might not have followed her completely. For that matter the article doesn't say if the family ever moved in the last 8 years; it is unfortunately rather common for patient's records to be incompletely copied from one clinic to another when patients change their primary care providers.
Also worth noting from the article:
Crohn's disease is often misdiagnosed or diagnosed very late, says Dr. Corey Siegel, director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
"Granulomas are oftentimes very hard to find and not always even present at all," Siegel said. "I commend Jessica for her meticulous work."
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
While looking under a microscope at slides of her own intestinal tissue in her AP science class...
How the hell do you get samples of your own intestinal tissue? And in AP science class to boot?
I have a bad feeling about this...
Seems like she'd make a good doctor. :)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
The fact that she did her own biopsy if her intestinal tissue at school is impressive!
What, you gotta assume that if she did it all herself then she did it ALL herself.
That's gotta hurt.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Her "non-diagnosis" issue is probably two fold. First, almost every doctor out there just wants you in and out and quick as possible. In their mind the negotiated rates with insurance companies is making it difficult to afford their lifestyle compared to other doctors. This is usually further worsened by bad data models. They usually don't remember you and the computer or paper files they have access to are not built for their ease of use. It's not uncommon for me to go into a doctors office and after a few minutes of talking to them, realize they have the wrong patient's information loaded on the computer.
The other issue is the ego. Some doctors tend to think that if you don't "fit the pattern" of something they know then you are either faking it or crazy. I've gone between two doctors before. While one was familar with my issue and wanted to help, the other pretty much looked me like I was crazy and started babbling non-sense just to get me out of the room.
So, in the end you do have to trust your doctors, they have the background, but at the same time you have to stay alert to when they are being ego fools, or being shortchanged by a bad data model. Don't be afraid to stick in their face that you don't feel like they are listening or understanding your issue.
This is even more dangerous for kids for don't have the life experience to tell when a doctor is in uncharted territory. So, it's important for parents to stay involved.
Yet to reach a diagnoses, but I've successfully self-medicated.
There's no cure. From Wikipedia: "There is no known drug or surgical cure for Crohn's disease;[8] treatment options are restricted to controlling symptoms, maintaining remission and preventing relapse." I suppose perhaps peace of mind in knowing what it is that's wrong, but there's still nothing she can do about it.
Not really my area of expertise... but where/how did she get this tissue? Extracting intestinal samples doesn't sound like something we did in high school...
Can all fish swim?
HA! You must be new here!
Your doing it wrong.
Your not supposed to read anything but the headline, and then make wild assumptions and accusations.
Get with the program, sheesh!
I didn't mean to imply anything wrong (and she is certainly entitled to samples of her own intestinal tissue), but it seems a bit unusual, doesn't it? I mean I ask for the parts to be returned when I go the the auto repair shop, but I never asked for slides of tissue samples from my doctors.
To be 100% clear, I think it's great she did, I'm happy she was able to diagnose her disease, and if I were her I'd look for an entire new set of doctors. Hopefully, she'll find a way to ride this "news" for a slot in a good pre-med program when she graduates from HS.
Ken
Just for the record, panadol (paracetamol) is very effective at reducing temperature ("antipyretic") even at low doses - and is often used specifically for that purpose.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
The thing is, it isn't. The vast majority of diagnoses are accurate. They just don't make news, just like the millions of trans-Atlantic flight-miles that don't result in a plane crashing into the ocean.
Its "obvious" now that this girl had Chron's disease, after you know what to look for. Of course, even with that knowledge, she didn't match the symptoms that a vast majority of patients had, and her tissue biopsy was hardly staring anyone in the face (if they hadn't ordered the biopsy at all I'd expect more righteous indignation).
This is hard - and ordering the wrong treatment can be fatal, especially if you're not completely sure what's going on. Not somewhere you want to just throw darts and see what sticks.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
See, that's the part that makes me mad in all of this. The evidence was right there, how come it took a teenage girl to find it? They clearly weren't that interested in actually doing their jobs. We've all been guilty of this kind of thing when making some french fries or writing a TPS report, but it's just unacceptable when we're talking about a human life.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One might think so, but the question I would have then is where did the sample *she* used come from. According to TFA:
"she was looking under the microscope at slides of her own intestinal tissue -- slides her pathologist had said were completely normal"
Assumedly she hadn't performed a self-biopsy for the samples and had actually received them from the pathologist. I believe the error might have been a bit more easily forgiven if they had biopsied and not gotten a sample indicating the disease (fairly common, my grandfather's lungs, though riddled with cancer, took multiple biopsies to find an afflicted sample). However, this was in from their own sample, which from the article had already been "passed" as normal.
What were they doing in this science class that involved students examining tissue from their own intestines, and how was this tissue acquired?
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
She lives in or near Sammamish, Washington. So, while they do have some medical use, they're not all that open. Considering that possession of little more than an ounce or cultivation of any kind is still a felony.
That's right, she lives in or near Sammamish, WA, which means she's about 2 hours from Vancouver. Hmmm....
This is why they call it 'practicing medicine'. Not many Doctors are that good at it yet.
Seriously. The most common form of practicing medicine is actually better phrased as 'statistical medicine'. If you have a complaint with a set of symptoms, the Doctor will look at your overall and family health history, your age and basically look at what is most likely to be the diagnosis. If your real issue is not blatantly obvious to see, or you just happen to be unfortunate enough not to fit this well oiled set of statistics. Then you are likely to go undiagnosed. Very few Doctors and specialist will take the time and effort with every patient to hit that few percent that fall outside. They almost always figure they will get a second shot at it at least without causing to much harm or risk to the patient.
The practice of practicing statistical medicine is well known in the profession. There is plenty of literature within the various disciplines about the situation and costs involved. What I don't understand is that the title should not have been this individual diagnosed herself. More appropriately. 'How many patients routinely find the cause of their illness' before the medical profession does, like this woman did. I would hazard a guess that a 'Specialist' level of failure is statistically related to the statistics they use, on your specific complaint. To put it another way. If we still deal with only the specialist level of care, then over one year period. If 10 patients of the same demographic come into the office with the same complaint and the actual disease has only a 1% chance of hitting that age group. But for argument sake all actually have this disease. He will either get only 1 wrong or he will get it wrong for all but one. Guess what really happens? Use statistics if you wish. :)
There are plenty of things without a cure. Severe allergies (although these often wax/wane with time), diabetes, various forms of epilepsy, and many other conditions. Knowing the issue allows you to address the issue in a manner that can be life-saving or at the very least life-extending/improving.
If you have epilepsy, it might not be curable but the medication can help prevent seizures which means you don't die twitching on the floor, and in many cases can even drive a vehicle etc (which you'd otherwise be unable to do).
Knowing one's allergies allows you to carry medication such as an epi-pen if they're severe, or know to take allergy meds when symptoms that are often very similar to other conditions crop up (one thing I personally know a lot about, allergies can cause skin, stomach, breathing, flu-syptoms or many other issues ).
Diabetes: knowing one is diabetic, and thus monitoring+adjusting one's blood-glucose can save you from an early death and other nasty side-effects
Yes, a cure is the optimal solution. But after 8 years of painful symptoms, I'm assuming that being able to suppress said symptoms over a long term is still a whole lot better than "no good" and "nothing she can do about it". It's not just peace of mind.
Is it just me or does this sentence not make sense - "Then one day in January someone was finally figured out what was wrong with Jessica. That person was her."
"Someone set us up the bomb"
"We Get Signal"
"Hello Gentleman, All Your Base Are Belong To Us"
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
to diagnose Convergence Insufficiency. It's an incredibly simple eye problem, should have been caught in grade school but wasn't. Anyone who's having trouble keeping their mind focused while reading should get tested. I drove myself crazy, thinking I had ADD (that catch-all for "brain no work good"), until I stumbled across this. It might have been tolerable to ignore CI before we all started staring at computer screens all day and could easily get high paying jobs that didn't require serious reading, but now it's not and it's worth the cost of an optometrist's exam that you're likely overdue for anyhow. The CI website will direct you to doctors who know what to check.
It's not that doctors are useless. It's the medical system that's useless.
The knee problem, for instance. The word "doctor" means "teacher". In the days when doctors were essentially the servants the wealthy, that's what they did. If you were lord of the manor, you'd have a social relationship with the local doctor and unlimited access to his time. In the modern system, doctor time is factor of production, and expensive one. Profits are maximized by getting enough results that patients don't give up in droves with the minimum amount of doctor time. Alternative medicine may sometime succeed where conventional fails because it operates on a more personal level.
The panadol business is a direct result of the way drugs are developed and marketed. Pharmaceutical companies compete by finding a drug that occupies a successful market niche and copying it. So doctors have a plethora of medications that do the same thing. They go with what they know (sometimes that depends on marketing). At the same time focusing on blockbuster niches means others aren't served yet -- e.g. pediatric treatments. So doctors have to adapt and do off-label applications. These aren't scientifically supported, so you can't blame doctors who haven't tried them for not believing in them.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
My friend's mother got cancer. They tried all sorts of "natural" treatments. By the time they were willing to give up and try real medicine it was too late and she died.
This, and what you wrote, are known as anecdotes. They are known to be very poor for generating actual knowledge that is likely to be correct. Something called data is known to do this convincingly, and to provable confidence levels.
Data indicates that doctors are not worse than useless, but osteopaths may very likely be.
IWtR woerkedd oouth briplliantly fopr me . Engvry bok;dy shold tryuk oit. Nevtr fgelt nbetytere.
where does an 18-year old get samples of her own intestinal tissue? When I was in biology in high school, we were content to stop at looking up a frog's ass in the name of science. Something is fishy about this story. Crohn's Disease isn't a rare malady. It's easily diagnosed by any doctor that specializes in digestive disorders. It seems weird to me that it couldn't be identified by a qualified doctor but an 18 year old could figure it out based on what she saw under a microscope in science class...
What the hell? Chron's isn't some super rare thing, this should have been diagnosed by her doctors years ago. kudos to her for figguring it out though.
I was wondering the same question. I'm guessing that is was from a fecal sample.
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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!
Yeah, done a fair bit of reading into this since I was diagnosed with a slightly more rare version, Crohn's Colitis.
They don't know what causes it (diet and other things used to be suspect, but in recent years have been disproved), they can't cure it, but with a ballanced course of medication it can be lived with.
She is lucky in a way, regular crohn's attacks the intestines and lower stomach region, there ain't much in the way of nerves up there. It can be worse, from time my symptoms started to flare to time I was diagnosed it was about 6 mths, toward the end of that time I could barely walk.
What is it? Its when your immune system just decides, kinda out of the blue, to attack your digestive tract. Treatable with anti-inflammatory (not good, the most effective one, prednisolone, also has some REALLY bad side effects), and immune suppressors.
...
yeah, it's off topic, but I had to really read that carefully a couple of times before I even noticed the extra "was" that was in there. It's amazing how the brain sometimes edits things as you read them to "fix" mistakes as you go without you even consciously noticing it....
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
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."
My primary care doctor is experienced and well known...
That kid wouldn't have been so certain based on his clinical experience of similar looking rashes.
This isn't necessarily a critique of your particular doctor but primary care doctors are *not* usually experts in rashes. I know this because my wife is a dermatopathologist and constantly complains about the skin "diagnosis" she gets from general practitioners. According to her, it is fairly rare to find a non-dermatologist doctor who is particularly competent or sophisticated at identifying skin conditions. There are a LOT of skin conditions that can mimic other skin conditions and the differences can be subtle to non-existent. Every doctor gets fooled - the more interesting question is how often? Your doctor might be good at skin conditions (or might be bad) but the best way to know for sure is to ask a pathologist. But even that is imperfect because pathologists get fooled too.
Doctors go with the story that makes sense but sometimes their first instinct is wrong. Fortunately in most cases the consequences of being wrong are minor. They have a saying that when you hear the sound of hoofs you think horses, not zebras. As a rule of thumb you don't treat the unlikely condition until you've ruled out or have reason to suspect the common condition is not present. I don't know the particulars of your case beyond what you've presented but I've heard many stories like yours. Sometimes the clues lead doctors down a wrong path.
The fact that the kid in this article had the problem for years but they never went back to the start of the decision tree to see where they went says something bad about her doctors.
Maybe but maybe not. The article leaves out a lot of information. We don't know how actively she (the patient) pursued getting a diagnosis. We don't know her medical history. We don't know what tests were tried and we don't know the results of those tests. We don't know what was discussed with the doctors and we don't know the qualifications of the doctors involved in her case. We don't know what she was treated for and what her differential diagnosis was. Some conditions simply are hard to diagnose even when you have all the facts. My wife is a pathologist and according to her it is apparently surprisingly easy to miss a clue on a slide. The better pathologists stress over this fact endlessly. Some conditions require looking at the slide on high power for a single unusual looking cell among many thousands. Sometimes the clues are breathtakingly subtle and the best "diagnosis" available is a list of conditions that cannot be ruled out - sometimes a long list of conditions unfortunately. A granuloma is apparently noteworthy but might not be diagnostic by itself. It could easily be missed with a moment's inattention. What I'm saying is that we should be careful about judging the physicians in this case because we very clearly do not have all the facts.
She's discovered what I started suspecting some years ago: that most doctors aren't really very good, and that medical science in general should only have the term "science" applied to it very, very loosely. We seem to have barely scratched the surface of how biological systems work, and that's a statement I'll only apply to those who are at the very top of their fields. The average run-of-the-mill HMO doctor I believe to be pretty clueless, which is only made worse by people who won't or can't question the decisions they're making for their health care.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
crone's disease! *rimshot*
1. Get your money. (Profit!)
2. Next patient.
3. Repeat.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Mine was Atypical Trigeminal Neuralgia, and while I didn't find out from a slide, there was a year of Doctors not diagnosing and my discovering what it was and pitching that to my neurosurgeon and getting a treatment that worked.
Republican-style Universal Health Care
Ingredients: Turkey, Mechanically Separated Turkey, Water, Salt, Flavour.
Someone in my family had self-diagnosed Alzheimer's disease, but I can't remember who.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Dnon'pt lijsetin too hiemm! Thhaat fowul bpotchchedd tehh hwole oupparaasion! Weere roooined!!
May the Maths Be with you!
... how Jessica often missed class, yet she was in advanced placement; she must be really smart. Good for you Jessica and hats off!
TOP DSLR Cameras Reviews of the top DSLRs
My wife was in a nursing home in a coma and the GP in question was too stupid and too lazy to call the neurosurgeon and inquire what the proper med levels were. She should have known. I did. Her own mother died of the same type of brain tumor.
There are many thick doctors out there. But where I live I have NEVER heard of a doctor having their license revoked. Sure - some diagnosis are difficult to make.
But I'm talking about adjusting the level of the steroids which in this case was Dexamethasone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexamethasone
This is a pretty common steroid to be administered to patients with a brain tumor. Further more the dosage in her case was up to about 15 mg/day because of her small stature. To let her lapse into a coma at 8 mg/day is malpractice in my books.
I was the one telling the nurse - but this was a nursing home - not a hospital. She needed to be in an auxillary hospital and were she there perhaps it wouldn't have happened.
I was the one who told the neurosurgeon what was going on and he was shocked and called the nursing home immediately and changed the prescription - OVER THE PHONE.
Yes the doctor on call had his number. I gave it to her.
I could have pulled her before the College of Physicians and Surgeons but I knew they would do nothing. I wonder how many patients were similarly treated by that incompetent witch doctor.
Well - that is why I never worked for Microsoft. That was 1984.
You see my wife had a brain tumor and I live in Canada. We have universal health coverage.
I thought of emigrating. I would NEVER consider recommending to anyone that they move to the states.
Never give slides to patient.
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.
"It's weird I had to solve my own medical problem."
Translation: typical US health insurance. I can only assume when she went to her GP, he told her to 'walk it off' (while insurance company vultures perched on both his shoulders).
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.
I was really wondering that too. I didn't see it mentioned in the article. Did she look at a fecal sample in class (eww), or did she have a classmate stick something up her rectum to get it? :) Either way, it's not something I'd exactly expect to happen in a classroom.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I'd reply with something intelligent, but you probably won't remember that you posted the original message. Now go take your Thorazine and stop calling me Billy.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
chronic stomach pain
chronic diarrhea
chronic vomiting
chronic fever
I'm no doctor but that reads like a list of Crohn's symptoms to me. Maybe what she really needs is a better GP.
When I used to live in Seattle it was an ABC station. I didn't even know CNN had broadcast stations. What the hey?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
The more and more common 'House Complex'. Did he grab your boob and call you an idiot, too?
"Everybody lies."
-- Dr. House
I have crohn's and wasn't correctly diagnosed for almost 3 years after I started complaining. The Doctors were like "shit Idk take this stuff 3 times a day" and after a while decided I had ulcerative collitus and started giving me medicine for that.
"Luckily" I finally found out what it was and was able to get "correct" treatment.... correct treatment being one of a many different options of which most fail and the ones that do work only work sometimes.
see if you can go 2 for 2 and cure it as well jessica, lol.
Maybe if you stayed with the same GP instead of shopping docs, and kept a copy of your records it would allow you to receive the level of care you seek. Most doctors I've been referred to from my GP or had records sent to actually read them or look at the referring physician's notes and are able to determine if it's time to start laying zebra traps.
How does one obtain one's own intestine cells? Direct on the point answer please, thanks!
She had sample slides that had previously been taken by her pathologist. How her pathologist got them? I'm not a doctor and I've never had an intestinal sample taken.
Yay me! ^^
I blame the parents. Adoption is a wonderful thing (or at least can be - of course, if adoptive parents abuse the kid, then it's not wonderful), but you should probably sit down with a kid sometime *before* they are old enough to be in a high-school biology class, and explain something like that to them. If a kid finds out from you, I imagine they are likely to be much less upset than if they find out about it on their own, later.
At least the answer was adoption. I thought your story was leading up to a "Your father was the postman" sort of ending. Better adoption than cheating, although testing one's own blood could lead to discoveries like that.
It never said she sampled her own intestinal tissue. From the article, it sounds like she got the slides from her doctor, after the pathologist had already 'examined' and missed the inflammation in the tissue. Honestly, she should probably be suing the pathologist for malpractice for declaring the slide to be 'completely normal', when it was not. This is also why second opinions are probably a good idea. One doc finds nothing wrong with a tissue sample? Ask to have a second doctor, not affiliated with the original hospital/practice, examine and give a second opinion.
My friend's mother got cancer. They tried all sorts of "natural" treatments. By the time they were willing to give up and try real medicine it was too late and she died.
Thats absolutely terrible. I am sorry to hear about it. I have never suggested that people with cancer should do other than see the appropriate medical professional.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Did you tell these useless doctors about the cycling?
Yep, but the bit the doctor doesn't understand (and the bike shop does) is that by height (193cm) is too high for off the shelf bike frames. I tend to ride around with the seat too low, hence the knee pain. Of course most bike shops will still sell bikes which are too small for the owner. There is no ethical standard which requires them to put the welfare of the customer/patient before getting a sale.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
For some demented reason I enjoy "studying" physical and mental illness and reading about pharmaceuticals in my spare time. Right out of college I was a more arrogant little bastard and thought I knew enough about everything to be an expert.
I don't want to get too deep into the issues, but I dealt with 7 people plus myself who got wrong advice/medications/treatments from doctors. I would lay out all the evidence I could accumulate and the patient would take it to their doctor and say "This is what is wrong" or "You put me on this medication and I feel like crap, maybe it's because it reacts this way to what you are already giving me." I just got lucky a few times. I was always spot on. I looked like a freaking genius. It got to the point where quite a few family and friends would call me before and after going to see a doctor. This didn't really help with my arrogance problem.
My mom has a long history of mental illness. Her doctors put her on some more pills that I considered to be foolish in the situation. I actually had the nerve to insist that she stop taking them and I acquired different medication for her (schedule IV stuff...I wasn't smuggling oxycontin or anything) and she started taking it. Long story short, three weeks later she had totally gone off the deep end. She destroyed a bunch of stuff in my parents' house, ripped up most of my dad's clothes, starting threatening homicide and/or suicide until finally my dad had to call the police. They gave her a three day restraining order and she kept coming back that and getting more beligerent before until finally five cops and the county psychiatric van pulled up and took her away for a little vacation.
That was quite an eye opener. I blew it. Bad. Looking back, I don't know what I was thinking. I had some problems of my own that I refused to attempt to treat/seek treatment for I did some good things for some people but helped cause a lot of problems for my parents.
This is a great story because it is important to be active participant in maintaining your health. Doctors are not infallible and you know your body/get more time to think about the issue than they get. When it comes down to it though, remember to seek the opinion of at least one, maybe more in important cases, actual medical professional.
It's not Lupus.
These people. If you had a code plenty of people who figured they needed the "real meds" would use it wrongly. Of course in your case it's worse since the effective medications to suppress coughing are mainly opiates so if you don't have a long history with the doc they may worry you are trying to score some drugs.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Unfortunately that would convey a falsely inflated sense of risk to most listeners.
I mean if your friend asks, "Hey, does anything bad happen to you if you eat a mentos after drinking coke?" The correct answer is NO not, "Well there is a small chance you will choke." Also consider what happens when news agencies report on super small risks from common products or behaviors. People often take a risk to mean something common enough to be worth worrying about.
Moreover, what the package insert says is often totally bogus. I believe they have to include the side effects found in the clinical trials even when those side effects occurred less frequently than they did in placebo. Even when it's right it can be misleading as it won't mention the risks you avoid by taking the medication (birth control helps prevent some conditions).
In short the doctor has a choice of providing the listener with what they really want to know, "Do I need to worry about anything because I'm taking this product?" or give a literally correct response that will be harmfully misunderstood by many patients.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Do some real digging here.... for the true big picture....
It is all the same Luciferean satanic System of blood sacrifice since cain slew Abel.
relating to the doctors(continued medical INQUISITION). Big Pharma....(sorceries(Revelation 18:23)
I.G.Farben//aka: The Bayer Aspirin Co.//Baxter
Wanna see how far down the rabbit hole you really are?
Here are 2 sites....Regarding this SUN SYSTEM used in "YOUR FACE"! and you have no clue... Matt does a pretty good job in revealing these things UNseen b 4 YOUR eyes....
when you are done; look at my site and study it in depth and not just a cursory first page, first paragragh view. They are all Freemasons//catholics as are all lawers, judges, politicians that are adjoined to the New World order (Novus ordo Serclorum) Great Seal//back of the dollar bill.
http://www.matthewdelooze.co.uk/viewpage.php?page_id=2
http://www.matthewdelooze.co.uk/readarticle.php?article_id=48
"The truth WILL set you free." STUDY, STUDY, STUDY, STUDY, STUDY.... The Georgia Guidestones, The Lucifer project, Project vatican, Nasa's Casinni(Jesuit) spacecraft//program, Project Bluebeam.....STUDY!
http://www.xanga.com/avenueoflight
I've had pneumonia four times since February, and we don't know what's causing it, first bout was in February, last bout was last week. That's a loss of almost six weeks of work and gross wages of almost $6000. But we're doing a bronchoscopy Friday and have numerous immunological tests being conducted, so hopefully we'll come up with something soon. All bloodwork, thus far, has said is that I have an infection. Well, DUH!
Yeah, a lot of medicine is played by the numbers. Though it's a lousy book, Travis Taylor's Warp Speed has some interesting observations on the non-science of modern medicine, which strongly corresponds to the statistical medicine that you describe.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
Yeah, none like to caught with their pants down.....!
The medical PROFESSion is a cult within a cult. It is another form of the Inquisition(medical) which has never ceased. They are between 2-10 members who readily pass the patient from one to another bleeding them dry(monetarily AND or physically).
This Luciferean Satanic System has been on planet Earth since Eve became Illumined! They all are, in bottom-line; trained in sorcery and witchcraft from Georgetown University under the hands of the Jesuit Order. Joseph Mengele was adjoined to this same system as was Hitler."EVERY (man-made) religion on this earth is adjoined to the very same Luciferean, Satanic SUN System Unaware; "MY PEOPLE" are destroyed for "LACK" of knowledge! This is just another form of DEpopulation used in the blood sacrifice that all the CULTures have used for paying homage TO THE "SUN"; (Horus, Amen-RA, ) the "ONE" "rising in the East", the Lightbearer, the Bright and Morning Star, the thousand points of light, the all-seeing eye Great Seal//(dollar bill) capstone UNattached(their Great Work, Grand Design, Utopian Scheme)!
Look up: The Georgia Guidestones, Fatima Crusader, the Lucifer Project, Project Bluebeam, The Holy Word Of GOD. All declare "OPENLY" their planned genocide and intentions.
It is "ALL" (SUN) worship representing Lucifer//Satan (Babylon Mystery Religion//Katholocism (Organized Christianity)with it's High Priest "Pontifex Maximus" (Pope)//Black Pope//Jesuit General (Adolfo Nicholas). They have planned to execute the DEpopulation from 6.2 billion people down to 5 1/2 million; thus even killing 1/2 of their own.For there are 1.2 million Catholics Today.... How Godly are they??????????
Jesus Christ is the Saviour, NOT the destroyer! Who are they worshiping? Wake up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I.G.Farbin created Zyklon B, the gas used to kill the jews(others) in GERMany. Who are they Today in ameriKa? The good old Bayer Aspirin Company//Baxter. Do YOU take aspirin???????????
Better not cast aside what i have written here. It "IS" a witness and a testimony; either for or against. Countless millions have died at the hands of this branch of Inquisitors being "LICENSED" to butcher amd mame you for MONEY(lust, greed)PLEASURE of which their 8 years of school cannot be REfunded otherwise....
What exactly is....."SOCIAL SECURITY"? (FASCISM)
They have incurred great massive debt! and owe countless favors. They are "ALL" either Freemasons OR Katholic??????? (Illuminati)//JESUIT..... as are all.... judges, lawyers, cops, politicians, etc.... WAKE-UP! Here's a taste:
http://www.matthewdelooze.co.uk/viewpage.php?page_id=2
http://www.matthewdelooze.co.uk/readarticle.php?article_id=48
Revelation 18:23 And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for (by thy sorceries) were all nations deceived. Look up sorceries... Pharma, Pharmaceia, pharmaceutical....drugs!!!! witchcraft, sorcery, Look up the blue CROSS and blue SHIELD insignia(Caduceus)... Look up Hermes, Look up the Hippocratic oath; they "SWEAR" to Apollo(Lucifer) and the other gods? OOOOPS!
If you seek the truth you SHALL find it.
www.Xanga.com/avenueoflight
I am honestly not surprised at this. Dr's seem to be particularly crappy at diagnosing this disease. It took my dad hundreds of hours of researching medical files, books, and various documents till he was able to diagnose my mom likewise. Since then, she has been in much better health. Before then, she had seen numerous doctors, none of which were able to appropriately diagnose her.
Are you asking for pictures? Coz...
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Most of the B vitamins, E, folates, etc. are additives in the bread anyway - you can get them just as easily by taking vitamin pills, and unless the UK interferes with that industry much more than the US does, it'll only cost you a few pence a day for a reasonable-quality generic multivitamin pill. (At least, if you're not allergic to yeasts, which tend to be an ingredient of most of them.) It's not a substitute for a balanced diet, of course, but it'll cover you for a range of nutrients.
On the other hand, just because we use lots of corn in the US doesn't mean we're not also using wheat - a lot of it goes to high-fructose corn syrup as a competitively-subsidized sugar alternative, and corn oils and corn starches are pretty common (I've got friends with corn allergies who are always hassled by these), and most corn-based breads are still half wheat because the texture's more controllable with some gluten in it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Don't know if it covers the type you've got or not, or if it's something that you can take when you're already sick, but it's a really good idea as a preventative.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Her pathologist gave it to her to use for the school experiment.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux