Five commonly misdiagnosed diseases

CNN ^ | September 27, 2007 | Elizabeth Cohen

[Gay State Conservative]

Actually,I'll take post #15 as an example that I asked for. All I'll say about post #15 is that when a patient is discharged from an ER (as opposed to being admitted to the hospital) he/she is routinely instructed to contact either his/her primary care doctor or a particular kind of specialist.ER's have,as their primary function,determining whether or not a patient has a serious or potentially serious illness and if they do,putting in motion then process where that condition will be dealt with in a timely and effective manner.

In cases where no serious or potentially serious condition is present the patient is,like I said,instructed to get follow-up.

[CougarGA7]

Just remember, one goal in life is to NOT have a disease named after you. Because if you do it means you were the first one with it and they didn’t know what the heck it was.

[Daffynition]

Actually the plan is not to have any malady that requires more than one band-aid.

[SunkenCiv]

This topic is a fascinoma.

[SunkenCiv]

[neverdem]

thanks, bfl

[Daffynition]

Loud-soft kamikaze indie rock? Huh? ;-D

[SunkenCiv]

http://www.textfiles.com/humor/aclamt.txt

[Daffynition]

WNL ...lest I sound like a FLK with GLM ...POPTA ...MTF. ;-D

[SunkenCiv]

;’) The first place I saw that was years ago in Nat Lamp’s “True Facts”.

[Daffynition]

Classic! I'm pondering changing my tag line to: "MTF". ;-P

[TruthSetsUFree]

"Medicine is a **very** inexact science. Anyone who thinks it's guaranteed that even a competent physician is going to correctly diagnose their unusual or difficult to diagnose problem is crazy."

Then why do so many of them act like it IS an exact sicence (based on all those numbers they get from your blood tests, etc.) and try to make you think they're the Medicine God and everything they say is gospel truth and you absolutely have no idea what you're talking about? (Even though you live with your body 24/7 and they barely look at you for 15 minutes?)

They'd be more accurate a greater percentage of the time if they'd give their patients some credibility and adopt a little more humility about their own limitations.

[CAluvdubya]

Actually, Nancy Keelan, a registered nurse, says, demand more tests

Under Hillarycare (or Arnoldcare), this will become an impossibility. The gubmint won't allow it!

[Daffynition]

[Ditter]

That is a great photo! Do you know where it was taken?

[Daffynition]

No I don't ...like most stuff shopped ...the source photo is lost. It looks like the Great Plains in the US or Canada, doesn't it? ;-D

A slightly less subtle background would be something like this ...

[Ditter]

When I saw the photo Lubbock Texas came to mind.

I am a fan of home made, one of a kind signs and often I will stop and take a picture of them whenever I can.

One of my all time favorites was painted on a large plank and nailed to a tree in the yard of a rundown country home, in red paint was one word [BOMBS]. (What were they thinking?)

Another was also a rundown country home and it said [PHILLIP’S WORM FARM] My husbands name is Phillip but it wasn’t his worm farm. LOL!

[Daffynition]

I love them too! New England used to have a lot of them but alas, they are disappearing. Maybe you can get published if your collection grows large enough ... unique Americana. ;-D

[MarkL]

You make a very good point. As someone who makes his living by fixing problems in the IT world, in many cases it's nearly impossible to diagnose a computer problem from the description given by the user. You practically have to pry the information out of them. But at least I can get yes or no answers to questions like, "is the light on", or "did the computer make a sound."

On the other hand, I would imagine that getting the sort of subjective answers that most doctors get make diagnosis far more difficult, especially if something isn't obvious. For instance, if I've got a gash in my arm, and blood is pouring out, the doctor has a pretty good idea of what the problem might be. On the other hand (and this is happening right now with my 84 year old aunt), if you tell the doctor "my stomach hurts" it's a bit more work to find out what the problem is. Of course, both of her daughters (a secretary and a photo stylist) are second-guessing the doctor at every step, since he hasn't been able to figure out what the problem is.

I figured I'd see if I could try, and I found that in 5 minutes of questions, I was getting contradictory answers to simple questions like "is the pain sharp or dull? (dull) Is it like heartburn? Do you feel like you've eaten too much? Is it an ache like you've strained yourself, or like what you'd feel with a bruise? (neither)... Anyway, I asked a bunch of questions, and really didn't get much of an answer. Her daughters are convinced that she's got H. Pyloric, and maybe she does. But the Dr doesn't think so, so he's not treating for it.

In the mean time, she's been through test after test, and haven't found anything at this point.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that one of the main reasons (IMHO) that people are mis-diagnosed is because they're not able to communicate clearly with the doctor.

Mark

[MarkL]

Actually, that's almost exactly what's on a cousin's headstone...

"Now do you believe I'm sick?"

Mark