4 ms·

Many doctors are good people and entered medicine to help others. But after about 5 min in practice realize you have no idea how to actually help most people, l

by doitLP 6y ago

Many doctors are good people and entered medicine to help others. But after about 5 min in practice realize you have no idea how to actually help most people, let alone cure them. New drugs get advertised to you even more heavily than to your patients, and so you prescribe. Systemic approaches to helping your patients are hard and those doctors that try it often don’t take insurance because most insurance companies won’t pay for their trouble. They want to fall back on the hard numbers of a limited set of narrow interventions. Perhaps if there was more upstream incentive to keep patients healthy things would be different. But at the end of the day, many patients are not compliant and are very resistant to lifestyle changes, and as a doctor, despite knowing more today about the human body than ever in history, deep down you know you’re little better than a charlatan.

DoreenMichele 6y ago
I'm alive in part because I was friends for some years with a physician and I was friends for some years with a former Registered Nurse who also studied a variety of other health approaches. Since we were friends, they heard a lot about my situation over a long period of time and this led to them giving me very useful feedback that changed the course of my life. Our current medical system has some serious problems in the way things get done that interfere with medical personnel being effective. I hope we can find real solutions for that in coming years.
- thimkerbell 6y ago
  Only if you are so inclined and it's not in the TMI realm or otherwise inadvisable, I'd be interested to hear the tl;dr of what you learned to do or not do.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    It's really too much information for a single comment. I do try to blog about it and I do have a reddit called r/HealthWorks where I keep hoping -- someday! -- people will join and talk with me and yadda. But in a nutshell (and this is very quick and dirty -- I have been doing this nearly twenty years): 1. A comment by my physician friend -- who minored in parasitology -- convinced me that I was correct that my husband had brought a parasitic infection back from Saudi and infected me with it sexually. So that same day, I said to my husband "You are never touching me again without a condom." My condition stabilized about two weeks later (after another round of antibiotics was prescribed) and I began slowly getting better thereafter. 2. He and I later divorced and I have been celibate for more than fifteen years while working on my health. Sex is germy and it was too much of a health risk for me for a long time. This is also part of a more general principle I have followed: If you have a chronic or recurring infection, figure out what the damn source is and resolve that piece. You don't pick up infections randomly from the ether or some nonsense. 3. I took about $300 worth of supplements for a few years to redress a huge backlog of nutritional deficiencies. 4. I got really picky about my diet. Among other things, I looked into fat chemistry and I avoid or limit long chain triglycerides and favor medium chain triglycerides. (Medium chain triglycerides have long been medically prescribed as beneficially for my condition and for other serious gut issues, but limiting long chain triglycerides is not anything I have ever seen recommended and it makes a really huge difference for me.) 5. The standard medical recommendation for my condition is a high fat, high salt, high calorie diet. The result is that the standard advice is to pursue a junk food diet. I do not count calories and I make an effort to get more salt than most people consume, but I got super picky about dietary quality and focused on nutritional density instead of calories per se. 6. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Or several pounds if you have a compromised immune system. I work hard at avoiding exposure to germs, etc. and I currently work from home to help me have control over my environment and limit my exposure to germs, chemicals, etc. There's no doubt more, but that's what occurs to me off the top of my head.
    - nate_meurer 6y ago
      > Sex is germy There's an understatement.
  - thimkerbell 6y ago
    (TMI as a euphemism for stuff that readers might not want to be reading on a mostly tech community site)
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      Your clarification is several hours too late. My edit window long since expired. And this is not a "mostly tech forum." Sorry. It's medical information. If it bothers you to know that disease can be transmitted sexually and likely was in this specific instance, I don't know what to tell you.

by doitLP 6y ago

DoreenMichele 6y ago

I'm alive in part because I was friends for some years with a physician and I was friends for some years with a former Registered Nurse who also studied a variety of other health approaches. Since we were friends, they heard a lot about my situation over a long period of time and this led to them giving me very useful feedback that changed the course of my life. Our current medical system has some serious problems in the way things get done that interfere with medical personnel being effective. I hope we can find real solutions for that in coming years.

thimkerbell 6y ago
Only if you are so inclined and it's not in the TMI realm or otherwise inadvisable, I'd be interested to hear the tl;dr of what you learned to do or not do.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  It's really too much information for a single comment. I do try to blog about it and I do have a reddit called r/HealthWorks where I keep hoping -- someday! -- people will join and talk with me and yadda. But in a nutshell (and this is very quick and dirty -- I have been doing this nearly twenty years): 1. A comment by my physician friend -- who minored in parasitology -- convinced me that I was correct that my husband had brought a parasitic infection back from Saudi and infected me with it sexually. So that same day, I said to my husband "You are never touching me again without a condom." My condition stabilized about two weeks later (after another round of antibiotics was prescribed) and I began slowly getting better thereafter. 2. He and I later divorced and I have been celibate for more than fifteen years while working on my health. Sex is germy and it was too much of a health risk for me for a long time. This is also part of a more general principle I have followed: If you have a chronic or recurring infection, figure out what the damn source is and resolve that piece. You don't pick up infections randomly from the ether or some nonsense. 3. I took about $300 worth of supplements for a few years to redress a huge backlog of nutritional deficiencies. 4. I got really picky about my diet. Among other things, I looked into fat chemistry and I avoid or limit long chain triglycerides and favor medium chain triglycerides. (Medium chain triglycerides have long been medically prescribed as beneficially for my condition and for other serious gut issues, but limiting long chain triglycerides is not anything I have ever seen recommended and it makes a really huge difference for me.) 5. The standard medical recommendation for my condition is a high fat, high salt, high calorie diet. The result is that the standard advice is to pursue a junk food diet. I do not count calories and I make an effort to get more salt than most people consume, but I got super picky about dietary quality and focused on nutritional density instead of calories per se. 6. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Or several pounds if you have a compromised immune system. I work hard at avoiding exposure to germs, etc. and I currently work from home to help me have control over my environment and limit my exposure to germs, chemicals, etc. There's no doubt more, but that's what occurs to me off the top of my head.
  - nate_meurer 6y ago
    > Sex is germy There's an understatement.
- thimkerbell 6y ago
  (TMI as a euphemism for stuff that readers might not want to be reading on a mostly tech community site)
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    Your clarification is several hours too late. My edit window long since expired. And this is not a "mostly tech forum." Sorry. It's medical information. If it bothers you to know that disease can be transmitted sexually and likely was in this specific instance, I don't know what to tell you.