Slashdot Mirror
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
... 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
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.
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"
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.
Seems like she'd make a good doctor. :)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
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. :)
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"
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!
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!