8:19am July 22, 2013

➸ It's Clivers!: Meow meow my body is a jerk

clivers:

I don’t mean to complain… I just have to get it out so I don’t explode/go crazy.

I’ve been off work for 5 days. I still can’t be ok taking any less than 20mg prednisone. I’m so tired all the time, yesterday was MTX day so today I’ve been hella sick and weak. I really hate this!!!! My CRP and ANA…

I hate the way a lot of doctors rely too heavily on labs. Because it’s actually possible to have a lot of conditions even when the lab tests are negative. And not to have them even when lab tests are positive. And I suspect most conditions don’t even show up on lab tests, or show up in ways that aren’t yet understood.

With one of my conditions, gastroparesis, they actually KNOW… that the severity of symptoms is not always correlated with the results of a gastric emptying study. Like some people empty relatively fast, and have severe symptoms, while others empty very slow and have practically no symptoms. Mediocre doctors will expect gastroparesis symptoms to correlate perfectly with lab results, but good ones know better.

My mom, when she was a respiratory therapist, noticed a lot of ER docs overly rely on pulse ox measurements. She said she once saw a doctor looking only at the machine, pronounce a guy fine, and she was actually looking at the guy and had to yell to a nurse to get the crash cart NOW…. just before he stopped breathing.

The human body is a complicated thing. And even our fanciest lab tests are really simplistic in comparison. Doctors should be using them as a guideline, but not acting like if they don’t find anything than nothing is there.

(And on the other side of things, there are entire testing companies that deliberately produce fraudulent results, for the use of quack doctors who want to reassure their patients of the fact that “the tests show something wrong”. The docs never tell their patients that those tests would show things wrong for ANYONE. Or else they do genuine testing, but mislead their patients about the results. A popular one is to test for the presence of Candida, which exists in everyone’s body. And then interpret the presence of ANY Candida as a sign of “Candida overgrowth”, and then proceed to tell them they have a systemic Candida infection. When such infections are actually rare, generally only present in people with severe immune compromise, and can be fatal. But these doctors will blame Candida for every symptom known to man, provide their patients with a list of common symptoms for ANY sick person and even some healthy people, and rake in the money when their patient, predictably, had most of those symptoms.)

So our over reliance on test results both makes regular doctors fall to believe there’s something wrong when there is, and makes quack doctors sell whatever their favorite treatment is by falsifying or grossly misinterpreting lab results.

(I’ve been through both situations, so I’m really familiar with how it works.)

A good doctor will use lab results as a tool. Not claim nothing is wrong if they’re fine, or nothing is wrong ENOUGH, or whatever.

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