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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
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
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?
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.
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
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
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 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.
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.
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.
Seems like she'd make a good doctor. :)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
As someone with severe Crohn's Disease, I can say that it's important that you don't over look the exact phrase you mentioned: controlling symptoms dramatically increases quality of life, and preventing relapse reduces the damage to her intestines and will in turn hopefully reduce the number of surgeries she will need later on in life. So yes, I'd say that while she can't cure her Crohn's, now that she has an arsenal of medications at her disposal, there's plenty that she can do about it.
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. :)
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.
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!
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."
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!
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.