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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."
...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.
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.
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 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.
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
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"
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.
Well, Wikipedia can be suspect at times, but here's what it says (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crohn%27s_disease#Symptoms):
Really sounds to me like a combo of on-again off-again symptoms and symptoms that are fairly generic (i.e., shared w/ lots of conditions) than doctors and labs trying to squeeze ever last buck out of someone and their insurance. Now, if there is a problem if the first thing they do is run expensive tests for exotic diseases or something like that. I mean, a responsible physician would consider the a priori odds of each condition. And while I'm sure there are plenty of "quacks" out there, I'm not sure that's the first conclusion I would reach for in this particular case.
That's not funny. My brother died from dyslexia.
Really sounds to me like a combo of on-again off-again symptoms and symptoms that are fairly generic (i.e., shared w/ lots of conditions) than doctors and labs trying to squeeze ever last buck out of someone and their insurance. Now, if there is a problem if the first thing they do is run expensive tests for exotic diseases or something like that. I mean, a responsible physician would consider the a priori odds of each condition. And while I'm sure there are plenty of "quacks" out there, I'm not sure that's the first conclusion I would reach for in this particular case.
Exactly! Her symptoms could have pointed to IBS, poor diet, allergies, repeated food poisoning or even hypochondria. I don't expect a doctor to run every patient with a headache through an MRI. If this poor student truly was visiting quacks, they would have run every test known to man on her just to pocket the CHIP money!
What I really want to know is how they got a sample of her intestinal tissue for a high school science class.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
True but most rich people didn't inherit their wealth (http://www.smartmoney.com/spending/rip-offs/10-things-millionaires-wont-tell-you-23697/ "or take the most common path: running your own business. That's how half of all millionaires made their money, according to the AmEx/Harrison survey. About a third had a professional practice or worked in the corporate world; only 3 percent inherited their wealth.").
According to the article her pathologist gave her the slides for the class project.
--- Errr......No I don't need more oral sex thank you, Windows goes down on me all the time.
So what percentage of those "self made" people had wealthy parents who could pay to put them through the best schools and connect them with those who could help them succeed?
Take Gates for example. His parents were well to do lawyers who sent him to Harvard and it was his mother who directed IBM to him for DOS. If he had been born to minimum wage parents would he be wealthy now? Maybe but much less likely.
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. :)
IWtR woerkedd oouth briplliantly fopr me . Engvry bok;dy shold tryuk oit. Nevtr fgelt nbetytere.
Yeah a lot of self diagnoses probably revolved around: "It hurts when I pee ... that bitch/bastard" :-)
if you can't remember whether the offender was a bitch or a bastard, you're probably partly to blame
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
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!