11 ms·

So things that can look like anemia can be other things! Case in point, my wife was misdiagnosed for months with Anemia. What she really has is several tick Bo

So things that can look like anemia can be other things! Case in point, my wife was misdiagnosed for months with Anemia. What she really has is several tick Bourne diseases. For 5 months her doctors kept giving her blood transfusions as he hemoglobin reading was around 4-5 and it should be 12-13 for a normal person. Can't tell u how many specialists and emg room visits. Finally found a female md that listened to her and gave the approval to do a comprehensive tick panel. Sure enough rocky mountain spotted fever, erlicheaosis, recurring Lyme fever and regular old Lyme. The blood they were giving her was basically like throwing gas on a fire. Almost was ready to make funeral arrangements. Let me say tick diseases are going bonkers and a lot of people don't know they have it. Plus a lot of doctors won't believe or authorize tests. Advocate for yourself or you might die! Not kidding !

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> Plus a lot of doctors won't believe or authorize tests. Advocate for yourself or you might die! Not kidding ! Experienced this myself. So mant doctors behave like JavaScript developer and I am another webpage
- pojzon 4y ago
  At least in Eastern Europe thats because they dont really have the time needed to help the patient. Its a business and you have 10m to do all paper work, check patient and prescript something. Its horrible. Doesnt help that private doctors are super expensive, dont care about you and dont believe you. Health became just another accommodity only super rich can pay for.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    - moneywoes 4y ago
  - Asooka 4y ago
    The best approach remains to know the right people who can tell you about which doctors are good. Or as the kids call it,"networking". E.g. my dentist (an exceptionally good and professional woman) is someone I know because she's friends with the wife of a colleague of a girl I went to high school with. I hope that the new health platforms that are springing up will lead to knowledge of which doctors are worth their pay being easier to access and spread.
InCityDreams 4y ago
>Advocate for yourself or you might die! Not kidding ! Paid healthcare? As a europopulator i can choose to pay for my healthcare. Rest assured, that when i do pay, i insist on certain things. Like doing the tests i insist on... "Plus a lot of doctors won't believe or authorize tests." Surely, the money talks in a situation like this? I can pay for any test i like and no (socialist, here) doc would ever say no, nor would they actually give a crap.
- pojzon 4y ago
  Not everyone can pay. Health should not be gated behind a paywall. Life is not a microtransaction game.
- brewdad 4y ago
  If insurance doesn't approve the test, it won't be paid for. Insurance also means US prices for tests are elevated to 10x what they "should" cost because providers expect insurance to knock the price back down to a reasonable cost. As a result, ordering a bunch of unapproved tests leads to huge out of pocket costs for patients so only the wealthiest will ever be willing to push for them. Ironically, that same population also is the most likely to have insurance that will cover the tests in the first place. So it goes.
  - smabie 4y ago
    You actually can negotiate pretty easily with most hospitals / doctors. After getting the bill just say you can't pay and offer a fraction of the cost. Many times they will say yes (alternative for them is selling the debt for cents on the dollar anyways) Source: have done this 2-3 times in the past when I was poor / used to not have self insurance.
- gtvwill 4y ago
  On the other hand I have to travel 30 mins cus the 5 doctors in my town no longer bulk bill and I can't afford the cost to go see them. The fact your ok with having to pay for a better standard of healthcare rather than just having a society which provides the best healthcare for all. Is legit cooked.
robonerd 4y ago
> Let me say tick diseases are going bonkers and a lot of people don't know they have it. Plus a lot of doctors won't believe or authorize tests. The existence of Chronic Lyme disease is very controversial and diagnosing it can get doctors in trouble (depending on the jurisdiction.) Whether or not Chronic Lyme disease is real (I don't know), I think the general consensus of CLD diagnoses being quackery might bias doctors against diagnosing any sort of tick related disorders, particularly chronic ones.
- crooked-v 4y ago
  The general medical consensus is that "chronic Lyme disease" doesn't exist and that symptoms attributed it often have to do with chronic fatigue syndrome or infection-triggered fibromyalgia.
  - hmmokidk 4y ago
    Doctors often don’t believe in fibromyalgia…
    - cameronh90 4y ago
      Doctors generally believe in fibromyalgia. What's more controversial is whether it's a disease, disorder, symptom or syndrome. A patient experiencing fibromyalgia is very obviously unwell, but in many (not all!) cases it's comorbid with depression and treatment with antidepressants and therapy helps with both the depression and fibromyalgia. As of right now, it's not especially clear what things like fibro and CFS are, and whether they might be mental disorders in some cases, but they're definitely real.
joshgel 4y ago
Err it’s more that tick-borne diseases cause anemia. There are lots of things that cause anemia! And someone with unexplained anemia deserves a complete work up (especially with hemoglobin levels in the 4-5 range), including for tick-borne illnesses, especially if they have been in an endemic area. But lots of other things worth checking too, many more dangerous than tick-borne illnesses.
lkrubner 4y ago
I had some illness for much of 20 years. Doctors were uncertain about what it was. They eventually called it Lyme disease because they weren't sure what else to call it. But I was stuck taking antibiotics for 20 years. I tried several times to quit the antibiotics, but I always got badly sick when I did. I eventually managed to achieve a complete cure, by fasting with only water for 2 weeks. I describe this whole saga in detail here: http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/how-i-recovered-from-lyme-disease http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/how-i-recovered-from-...
- temeritatis 4y ago
  That is super interesting, thanks for sharing! Sometimes, less is more.
afterburner 4y ago
Lyme disease is spreading northward, areas that would have never thought about it 20 years ago need to exercise caution when hiking on uncleared paths (or when diagnosing patients), but the awareness isn't that huge right now.
xenocratus 4y ago
It took years for me to be diagnosed with thalassemia when my GP found some of my blood results suspicious. Got treated for anaemia a few times before, and was refused for blood donations as well without being able to explain what was wrong. My blood tests said "anaemia", but my life experience said "all seems ok to me...?" - luckily I have a mild form, I just need to watch my diet a bit. My dad also found out through my diagnosis why he kept getting those same signs in his tests... :) Eastern European medical system at its finest.
danachow 4y ago
A hemoglobin for 4-5 is anemia - the definition of anemia is low hemoglobin concentration. If your wife had hemoglobin that low, then she was correctly diagnosed with anemia. It is a bit odd though the apparent coinfection with multiple tick borne illnesses from different species of ticks - A lyme and ehrlichiosis coinfection is not surprising, but rocky mountain spotted fever is a very different illness, often more acute in presentation with distinctive signs and symptoms - but coinfection with the other two would be quite rare. Also, those specific tick illnesses listed are unlikely to cause that profound of an anemia by themselves, so there's probably some other pathology going on - the tick borne infection may only be a trigger. Any relatively young person that is otherwise healthy (no near end state kidney disease) should definitely get referral to a hematologist for hemoglobin of 4-5 if it isn't something blindingly obvious like blood loss.
- DantesKite 4y ago
  > If your wife had hemoglobin that low, then she was correctly diagnosed with anemia. That seems like a somewhat myopic perspective. Saying this patient was "correctly diagnosed with anemia" would be like diagnosing a cancer patient currently undergoing chemotherapy with male pattern baldness. A more accurate and helpful diagnosis would probably be something like "Babesiosis"——anemia caused by ticks infected with a microbe that destroys red blood cells especially considering the multiple cofactors at play. Or whatever it was that specifically caused the anemia; the parent comment didn't say.
  - danachow 4y ago
    Dude, I'm just addressing this: "So things that can look like anemia can be other things! Case in point, my wife was misdiagnosed for months with Anemia." Which is a bit of a confused statement. > Saying this patient was "correctly diagnosed with anemia" would be like diagnosing a cancer patient currently undergoing chemotherapy with male pattern baldness. No, that's a pretty shit analogy and completely wrong. First, because chemotherapy doesn't cause "male pattern baldness" - the mechanisms aren't the same. So that's just wrong - while someone with a hemoglobin of 4 has anemia, whatever the underlying cause may be - it isn't a look alike - it is. Second, diagnosing Alopecia (secondary to chemotherapy) is a perfectly reasonable diagnosis. Because it is something that doctors do manage with specific things separately from the chemotherapy and other cancer treatment, eg wigs, scalp cooling. People can have more than one relevant diagnosis that they are treated for and are interrelated. For instance, if someone has anemia that is due to something like a GI bleed, they have both a GI bleed and anemia. If their hemoglobin is less than 7 you will likely treat that anemia with a blood transfusion independent of what you're doing to manage the GI bleed. GI bleed, iron deficiency, malabsorption, microcytic anemia are all diagnoses - they may be all interrelated. > A more accurate and helpful diagnosis would probably be something like "Babesiosis"--anemia caused by ticks But babesiosis is not anemia. It often occurs with it, but the diagnostic criteria for babesiosis is blood smear or PCR. If someone has a smear positive for babesia then they have babesiosis regardless of their Hgb/Hct. And notably they listed a bunch of tick borne illnesses listed, babesiosis was not among them.
Gatsky 4y ago
Small adjustment here... anemia is not a disease, it merely describes the state of having reduced hemoglobin concentration in the blood. It doesn't make sense to say things can 'look' like anemia. It has myriad causes. It is never benign, and should always be investigated thoroughly.
xdrone 4y ago
Yeah I just learned this from a video. https://youtu.be/HOK3NS2bD3M https://youtu.be/HOK3NS2bD3M Iron deficiency can be your body fighting off a disease, and adding iron is the wrong thing to do. I also learned excessive iron is worse than low iron, your body can regulate the intake but not expend iron. Iron is complex.
cfcf14 4y ago
Hey, I noticed that you explicitly mentioned that you found a female md that was the one to ultimately make the correct diagnosis. Do you feel that the previous md's (males?) were unwilling to consider they should conduct a tick panel due to bias? I ask because my partner has had comparable resistance for a very different ailment and I'm interested in possible systemic errors occurring.
- areoform 4y ago
  Yes, male doctors often don't listen to women. Speaking from both personal experience and the experience of almost every other woman I know. Medicine is a horribly antiquated and biased field. It's one of the few fields that need to be automated.
  - Lammy 4y ago
    I wonder if that type of bias could be some result of the way medical schools structure the courses training our doctors, or if medicine is just a universal enough human need that it exposes bias inherent in all areas of our society.
    - haldujai 4y ago
      Physician bias that women and people of colour are “tougher” is real. We are educated about it and are improving but as with bias against these classes of individuals everywhere else in life, we have come a long way but we are not perfect. Most current medical schools (at least reputable ones) provides extensive training on this matter.
  - Auracle 4y ago
    I’m sure that can happen, but please don’t just to that conclusion just because of sex differences. I’m a man and I’ve had plenty of male doctors not listen to me as well, along with one or two very dismissive female doctors. It’s a profession that attracts know-it-alls along with those that actually want to help but are overworked.
vo2maxer 4y ago
I understand your family’s frustration but it’s hard for me to think that the only presentation (both by history and hematologically) was a Hgb of 4-5 and physicians just proceeded to transfused with no further questioning or consideration for the large number of diseases in the differential diagnosis. Did she have low platelets (thrombocytopenia)? Had she had a rash previously? Was she outdoors in areas where ehrlichiosis or rickettsia carrying tIcks are known to be endemic? I’m sorry but you provide minimal information and then dump on physicians. Yes, it’s possible that you dealt with dozens of careless physicians but what information did your wife provide to that one female physician, which triggered the battery of serologic tests, and that no other doctor could elicit in the flood of previous medical evaluations. It’s not as if your wife just shows up with vague malaise and fatigue but everything else is normal in her history and in the examination. She has a Hgb of 4-5. Was a hematologist called in? Was ID called in after she remembered that fever and rash she’d previously experienced, for example.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  The deficit of knowledge is bilateral. Sure clinicians don't know about patient risk factors, but people get things like rashes very commonly from a wide array of sources. Either way, the parent post was saying that people should inform and advocate for themselves. This is entirely consistent with your message. I agree with your greater sentiment that people place unreal expectations on their doctors. The point is that doctors are fallible and not omniscient. This is just reality, patients need to be their own advocate. Blame is beside the point.
- cameronh90 4y ago
  There are quite a few incompetent doctors, sadly, and they stick together and support each other. While I'm generally reluctant to bring up identity politics, it does appear that women and people of colour tend to experience this worse than others. My mum had abdominal surgery, and one night following the surgery, she felt an extremely painful tear sensation in her lower abdomen and shortly afterwards noticed a big asymmetric lump in the intestinal area. My partner is an ICU nurse and suspected a hernia so we took her to the local hospital and the doctor said it's just post-surgical swelling. It didn't go away, rather it got bigger, more painful and frequently gurgled, so we went to the GP. The GP said it's probably just because she's had kids 30 years ago (!?) and that my mum needs to get used to not looking attractive any more, and to lose weight. What followed was months of doctors visits trying to get them to even accept there was even an issue. Bear in mind, this was a significant, painful gurgling lump, around the size of a tennis ball. Yet doctor after doctor said there was nothing wrong with her and she should consider therapy and antidepressants instead. After a few more months, she began experiencing such bad pain that she couldn't walk, and finally a junior female doctor suggested she had a hernia. However, she got overruled by her senior and sent home with paracetamol. The junior doctor quietly told her to go to another hospital. We managed to convince my mum this was ridiculous and brought her to London, where she got looked at by a hernia expert, who was very concerned about her treatment thus far and sent her for a CT and - obviously - found a large hernia. Due to the time it was left untreated, the repair was very challenging with many complications. Back home again, while recovering, she was having the early warning signs of an infected surgical wound (hot swelling, pus, smell, chills etc.) and again the local hospital fobbed her off and said she's overreacting, didn't swab the wound or change the dressing and sent her home. That night, she called me incoherent and I called for an ambulance - turns out she had sepsis and nearly died. I can promise you that we made sure everyone treating her had a full medical history at every point, but they still blatantly ignored what was right in front of them. There is actually a ton more to this too - the surgery in the first place which triggered all this was due to a medical error and wasn't necessary. It's been five years so far. She's currently suing the local hospital and doctors.
moneywoes 4y ago
How can we identify them! Also how to be safe?
sdeframond 4y ago
Is Bourne disease when you can't remember your past and start being chased by secret services' killers?
lloydatkinson 4y ago
> Plus a lot of doctors won't believe or authorize tests. In the UK there is a silent but serious case of people dying from cancers because GP's are refusing to refer anyone to the hospital for checks. The whole situation is deteriorating. It's not just cancers either, it's other types of conditions and even diseases these borderline incompetent GP's are either missing or simple refusing to listen to the patients. You can google any type of combinations of phrases, eg replace cancer with X condition and you'll get countless examples of that too. For example: https://www.google.com/search?q=people+dying+from+cancer+gp+refused+to+check&rlz=1C1CHBF_en-GB&oq=people+dying+from+cancer+gp+refused+to+check&aqs=chrome..69i57.6346j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=people+dying+from+cancer+gp+... People are literally dying because some GP's just don't give a shit.
winter_blue 4y ago
You have good points, but how was transfusing blood to increase her hemoglobin levels like "throwing gas on a fire"? Maybe it didn't help, but it surely didn't hurt? And, isn't it sort of a good thing to raise hemoglobin levels, in any case?

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> Plus a lot of doctors won't believe or authorize tests. Advocate for yourself or you might die! Not kidding ! Experienced this myself. So mant doctors behave like JavaScript developer and I am another webpage

pojzon 4y ago
At least in Eastern Europe thats because they dont really have the time needed to help the patient. Its a business and you have 10m to do all paper work, check patient and prescript something. Its horrible. Doesnt help that private doctors are super expensive, dont care about you and dont believe you. Health became just another accommodity only super rich can pay for.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  - moneywoes 4y ago
- Asooka 4y ago
  The best approach remains to know the right people who can tell you about which doctors are good. Or as the kids call it,"networking". E.g. my dentist (an exceptionally good and professional woman) is someone I know because she's friends with the wife of a colleague of a girl I went to high school with. I hope that the new health platforms that are springing up will lead to knowledge of which doctors are worth their pay being easier to access and spread.

InCityDreams 4y ago

>Advocate for yourself or you might die! Not kidding ! Paid healthcare? As a europopulator i can choose to pay for my healthcare. Rest assured, that when i do pay, i insist on certain things. Like doing the tests i insist on... "Plus a lot of doctors won't believe or authorize tests." Surely, the money talks in a situation like this? I can pay for any test i like and no (socialist, here) doc would ever say no, nor would they actually give a crap.

pojzon 4y ago
Not everyone can pay. Health should not be gated behind a paywall. Life is not a microtransaction game.
brewdad 4y ago
If insurance doesn't approve the test, it won't be paid for. Insurance also means US prices for tests are elevated to 10x what they "should" cost because providers expect insurance to knock the price back down to a reasonable cost. As a result, ordering a bunch of unapproved tests leads to huge out of pocket costs for patients so only the wealthiest will ever be willing to push for them. Ironically, that same population also is the most likely to have insurance that will cover the tests in the first place. So it goes.
- smabie 4y ago
  You actually can negotiate pretty easily with most hospitals / doctors. After getting the bill just say you can't pay and offer a fraction of the cost. Many times they will say yes (alternative for them is selling the debt for cents on the dollar anyways) Source: have done this 2-3 times in the past when I was poor / used to not have self insurance.
gtvwill 4y ago
On the other hand I have to travel 30 mins cus the 5 doctors in my town no longer bulk bill and I can't afford the cost to go see them. The fact your ok with having to pay for a better standard of healthcare rather than just having a society which provides the best healthcare for all. Is legit cooked.

robonerd 4y ago

> Let me say tick diseases are going bonkers and a lot of people don't know they have it. Plus a lot of doctors won't believe or authorize tests. The existence of Chronic Lyme disease is very controversial and diagnosing it can get doctors in trouble (depending on the jurisdiction.) Whether or not Chronic Lyme disease is real (I don't know), I think the general consensus of CLD diagnoses being quackery might bias doctors against diagnosing any sort of tick related disorders, particularly chronic ones.

crooked-v 4y ago
The general medical consensus is that "chronic Lyme disease" doesn't exist and that symptoms attributed it often have to do with chronic fatigue syndrome or infection-triggered fibromyalgia.
- hmmokidk 4y ago
  Doctors often don’t believe in fibromyalgia…
  - cameronh90 4y ago
    Doctors generally believe in fibromyalgia. What's more controversial is whether it's a disease, disorder, symptom or syndrome. A patient experiencing fibromyalgia is very obviously unwell, but in many (not all!) cases it's comorbid with depression and treatment with antidepressants and therapy helps with both the depression and fibromyalgia. As of right now, it's not especially clear what things like fibro and CFS are, and whether they might be mental disorders in some cases, but they're definitely real.

joshgel 4y ago

Err it’s more that tick-borne diseases cause anemia. There are lots of things that cause anemia! And someone with unexplained anemia deserves a complete work up (especially with hemoglobin levels in the 4-5 range), including for tick-borne illnesses, especially if they have been in an endemic area. But lots of other things worth checking too, many more dangerous than tick-borne illnesses.

lkrubner 4y ago

I had some illness for much of 20 years. Doctors were uncertain about what it was. They eventually called it Lyme disease because they weren't sure what else to call it. But I was stuck taking antibiotics for 20 years. I tried several times to quit the antibiotics, but I always got badly sick when I did. I eventually managed to achieve a complete cure, by fasting with only water for 2 weeks. I describe this whole saga in detail here: http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/how-i-recovered-from-lyme-disease http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/how-i-recovered-from-...

temeritatis 4y ago
That is super interesting, thanks for sharing! Sometimes, less is more.

afterburner 4y ago

Lyme disease is spreading northward, areas that would have never thought about it 20 years ago need to exercise caution when hiking on uncleared paths (or when diagnosing patients), but the awareness isn't that huge right now.

xenocratus 4y ago

It took years for me to be diagnosed with thalassemia when my GP found some of my blood results suspicious. Got treated for anaemia a few times before, and was refused for blood donations as well without being able to explain what was wrong. My blood tests said "anaemia", but my life experience said "all seems ok to me...?" - luckily I have a mild form, I just need to watch my diet a bit. My dad also found out through my diagnosis why he kept getting those same signs in his tests... :) Eastern European medical system at its finest.

danachow 4y ago

A hemoglobin for 4-5 is anemia - the definition of anemia is low hemoglobin concentration. If your wife had hemoglobin that low, then she was correctly diagnosed with anemia. It is a bit odd though the apparent coinfection with multiple tick borne illnesses from different species of ticks - A lyme and ehrlichiosis coinfection is not surprising, but rocky mountain spotted fever is a very different illness, often more acute in presentation with distinctive signs and symptoms - but coinfection with the other two would be quite rare. Also, those specific tick illnesses listed are unlikely to cause that profound of an anemia by themselves, so there's probably some other pathology going on - the tick borne infection may only be a trigger. Any relatively young person that is otherwise healthy (no near end state kidney disease) should definitely get referral to a hematologist for hemoglobin of 4-5 if it isn't something blindingly obvious like blood loss.

DantesKite 4y ago
> If your wife had hemoglobin that low, then she was correctly diagnosed with anemia. That seems like a somewhat myopic perspective. Saying this patient was "correctly diagnosed with anemia" would be like diagnosing a cancer patient currently undergoing chemotherapy with male pattern baldness. A more accurate and helpful diagnosis would probably be something like "Babesiosis"——anemia caused by ticks infected with a microbe that destroys red blood cells especially considering the multiple cofactors at play. Or whatever it was that specifically caused the anemia; the parent comment didn't say.
- danachow 4y ago
  Dude, I'm just addressing this: "So things that can look like anemia can be other things! Case in point, my wife was misdiagnosed for months with Anemia." Which is a bit of a confused statement. > Saying this patient was "correctly diagnosed with anemia" would be like diagnosing a cancer patient currently undergoing chemotherapy with male pattern baldness. No, that's a pretty shit analogy and completely wrong. First, because chemotherapy doesn't cause "male pattern baldness" - the mechanisms aren't the same. So that's just wrong - while someone with a hemoglobin of 4 has anemia, whatever the underlying cause may be - it isn't a look alike - it is. Second, diagnosing Alopecia (secondary to chemotherapy) is a perfectly reasonable diagnosis. Because it is something that doctors do manage with specific things separately from the chemotherapy and other cancer treatment, eg wigs, scalp cooling. People can have more than one relevant diagnosis that they are treated for and are interrelated. For instance, if someone has anemia that is due to something like a GI bleed, they have both a GI bleed and anemia. If their hemoglobin is less than 7 you will likely treat that anemia with a blood transfusion independent of what you're doing to manage the GI bleed. GI bleed, iron deficiency, malabsorption, microcytic anemia are all diagnoses - they may be all interrelated. > A more accurate and helpful diagnosis would probably be something like "Babesiosis"--anemia caused by ticks But babesiosis is not anemia. It often occurs with it, but the diagnostic criteria for babesiosis is blood smear or PCR. If someone has a smear positive for babesia then they have babesiosis regardless of their Hgb/Hct. And notably they listed a bunch of tick borne illnesses listed, babesiosis was not among them.

Gatsky 4y ago

Small adjustment here... anemia is not a disease, it merely describes the state of having reduced hemoglobin concentration in the blood. It doesn't make sense to say things can 'look' like anemia. It has myriad causes. It is never benign, and should always be investigated thoroughly.

xdrone 4y ago

Yeah I just learned this from a video. https://youtu.be/HOK3NS2bD3M https://youtu.be/HOK3NS2bD3M Iron deficiency can be your body fighting off a disease, and adding iron is the wrong thing to do. I also learned excessive iron is worse than low iron, your body can regulate the intake but not expend iron. Iron is complex.

cfcf14 4y ago

Hey, I noticed that you explicitly mentioned that you found a female md that was the one to ultimately make the correct diagnosis. Do you feel that the previous md's (males?) were unwilling to consider they should conduct a tick panel due to bias? I ask because my partner has had comparable resistance for a very different ailment and I'm interested in possible systemic errors occurring.

areoform 4y ago
Yes, male doctors often don't listen to women. Speaking from both personal experience and the experience of almost every other woman I know. Medicine is a horribly antiquated and biased field. It's one of the few fields that need to be automated.
- Lammy 4y ago
  I wonder if that type of bias could be some result of the way medical schools structure the courses training our doctors, or if medicine is just a universal enough human need that it exposes bias inherent in all areas of our society.
  - haldujai 4y ago
    Physician bias that women and people of colour are “tougher” is real. We are educated about it and are improving but as with bias against these classes of individuals everywhere else in life, we have come a long way but we are not perfect. Most current medical schools (at least reputable ones) provides extensive training on this matter.
- Auracle 4y ago
  I’m sure that can happen, but please don’t just to that conclusion just because of sex differences. I’m a man and I’ve had plenty of male doctors not listen to me as well, along with one or two very dismissive female doctors. It’s a profession that attracts know-it-alls along with those that actually want to help but are overworked.

vo2maxer 4y ago

I understand your family’s frustration but it’s hard for me to think that the only presentation (both by history and hematologically) was a Hgb of 4-5 and physicians just proceeded to transfused with no further questioning or consideration for the large number of diseases in the differential diagnosis. Did she have low platelets (thrombocytopenia)? Had she had a rash previously? Was she outdoors in areas where ehrlichiosis or rickettsia carrying tIcks are known to be endemic? I’m sorry but you provide minimal information and then dump on physicians. Yes, it’s possible that you dealt with dozens of careless physicians but what information did your wife provide to that one female physician, which triggered the battery of serologic tests, and that no other doctor could elicit in the flood of previous medical evaluations. It’s not as if your wife just shows up with vague malaise and fatigue but everything else is normal in her history and in the examination. She has a Hgb of 4-5. Was a hematologist called in? Was ID called in after she remembered that fever and rash she’d previously experienced, for example.

s1artibartfast 4y ago
The deficit of knowledge is bilateral. Sure clinicians don't know about patient risk factors, but people get things like rashes very commonly from a wide array of sources. Either way, the parent post was saying that people should inform and advocate for themselves. This is entirely consistent with your message. I agree with your greater sentiment that people place unreal expectations on their doctors. The point is that doctors are fallible and not omniscient. This is just reality, patients need to be their own advocate. Blame is beside the point.
cameronh90 4y ago
There are quite a few incompetent doctors, sadly, and they stick together and support each other. While I'm generally reluctant to bring up identity politics, it does appear that women and people of colour tend to experience this worse than others. My mum had abdominal surgery, and one night following the surgery, she felt an extremely painful tear sensation in her lower abdomen and shortly afterwards noticed a big asymmetric lump in the intestinal area. My partner is an ICU nurse and suspected a hernia so we took her to the local hospital and the doctor said it's just post-surgical swelling. It didn't go away, rather it got bigger, more painful and frequently gurgled, so we went to the GP. The GP said it's probably just because she's had kids 30 years ago (!?) and that my mum needs to get used to not looking attractive any more, and to lose weight. What followed was months of doctors visits trying to get them to even accept there was even an issue. Bear in mind, this was a significant, painful gurgling lump, around the size of a tennis ball. Yet doctor after doctor said there was nothing wrong with her and she should consider therapy and antidepressants instead. After a few more months, she began experiencing such bad pain that she couldn't walk, and finally a junior female doctor suggested she had a hernia. However, she got overruled by her senior and sent home with paracetamol. The junior doctor quietly told her to go to another hospital. We managed to convince my mum this was ridiculous and brought her to London, where she got looked at by a hernia expert, who was very concerned about her treatment thus far and sent her for a CT and - obviously - found a large hernia. Due to the time it was left untreated, the repair was very challenging with many complications. Back home again, while recovering, she was having the early warning signs of an infected surgical wound (hot swelling, pus, smell, chills etc.) and again the local hospital fobbed her off and said she's overreacting, didn't swab the wound or change the dressing and sent her home. That night, she called me incoherent and I called for an ambulance - turns out she had sepsis and nearly died. I can promise you that we made sure everyone treating her had a full medical history at every point, but they still blatantly ignored what was right in front of them. There is actually a ton more to this too - the surgery in the first place which triggered all this was due to a medical error and wasn't necessary. It's been five years so far. She's currently suing the local hospital and doctors.

moneywoes 4y ago

How can we identify them! Also how to be safe?

sdeframond 4y ago

Is Bourne disease when you can't remember your past and start being chased by secret services' killers?

lloydatkinson 4y ago

> Plus a lot of doctors won't believe or authorize tests. In the UK there is a silent but serious case of people dying from cancers because GP's are refusing to refer anyone to the hospital for checks. The whole situation is deteriorating. It's not just cancers either, it's other types of conditions and even diseases these borderline incompetent GP's are either missing or simple refusing to listen to the patients. You can google any type of combinations of phrases, eg replace cancer with X condition and you'll get countless examples of that too. For example: https://www.google.com/search?q=people+dying+from+cancer+gp+refused+to+check&rlz=1C1CHBF_en-GB&oq=people+dying+from+cancer+gp+refused+to+check&aqs=chrome..69i57.6346j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=people+dying+from+cancer+gp+... People are literally dying because some GP's just don't give a shit.

winter_blue 4y ago

You have good points, but how was transfusing blood to increase her hemoglobin levels like "throwing gas on a fire"? Maybe it didn't help, but it surely didn't hurt? And, isn't it sort of a good thing to raise hemoglobin levels, in any case?