Happy New Year!!

All the best to my family, friends and colleagues in the coming year. May we all be blessed with good fortune and happiness in 2007!!
Auld lang syne

Oh the Shame of It All

In response to Ann Coulter's 'Godless' book released June 2006- Is it just me or does anyone feel like they are listening to a high school bully spew hatred in the middle of the school halls? Or perhaps of a child kicking and screaming in the centre of a room? The package can look nice but what's inside is still crap. That's all Ann Coulter is, well packaged and marketed crap. By the way, aren't nice conservative WASPs such as herself supposed to be married with a few children, or has that paradigm shifted too? I guess being 40+ and single can be the new conservative. Yeah, I said it.

If ever there was a wasted degree it's hers. She would have been better flipping burgers after her high priced law degree than insulting everyone who's not in her cirle of hate. It is not lost on me that I am stooping to her level but she seems to get off on people getting upset at her, and hey, the woman doesn't seem to be getting off a whole lot. 50 ain't so far away pumpkin, I'd find some poor conservative shmuck who'd put up with you before your fruit is-ahem- dried up.

Medical Mistakes

In reading a book on medical mistakes, I have been forced to recount my own experiences with misdiagnoses and non-diagnoses. I will not place blame with any one person nor will I divulge names of those involved. It will not help anyone to point fingers.
In my personal experience I have seen the skeptical looks on doctors faces when I present my complaint of illness. In one case which spanned several years until eventual (and coincidental) diagnoses and treatment, I now realize that as I was passed from doctor to doctor that my plight was dismissed as the rantings of an emotionally unstable hypochondriac. I was, as many are, at a double disadvantage being both female and quite young. If you fit that demographic you are, in short, screwed.
A plethora of books have been written on this subject to provide credible reasons for such staggering incidences of medical mistakes and those reasons range from funding (the most popular) to the over-reliance of technology. Medicine is an art which is sadly misunderstood by the very people who are charged with practicing it. Medicine is not linear, nor does it always follow the rules. For any budding doctors who believe medicine to be formulaic my advice is this - if you want hard and fast rules with no diversions from said rules and formulas, study math. Period.
In my own cases I have had at least a vague hypothesis for what may be wrong, it is after all my body for which I spend 24/7 in. Picture a weird noise developing in your car, you know it wasn't there yesterday and a mechanic certainly won't tell you otherwise. That's YOUR car and YOU know it better than anyone. Why do we allow others to tell us different when it comes to our bodies? I know that being a mildly educated health care worker, I cannot compete with 7-14 years of schooling, but where my body is concerned I have learned the hard way that sticking to your convictions it definitely worth while. A word of warning: you will be treated with amusement, then impatience and eventually contempt as you are shoved into every conceivable machine and are jabbed with every manner of instrument. You may even be labeled as loony. That is their problem not mine. My interest is my health and treat me as you like with hostility or patience but at least try.
A horrible pitfall of medical diagnosis is tunnel vision or "binning" as I like to refer to it. Binning occurs when a nurse or doctor hears your complaint but also allows their personal biases or previous experiences to mar their medical findings. A 20 something year old with heart problems? Not likely - place in the drug or alcohol bin. Chronic pain with no definable cause? Hysteria or hypochondria bin. I may be oversimplifying but I think I have made my point.
My advice to patients is always, if possible bring a friend or family member to appointment etc. to help you remember things. When in a doctors office or a hospital where you are anxious and are having tons of information thrown at you, it is helpful to have a second party there with you to help remember information later. If there is no one to go with you or you don't feel comfortable with it, bring a notebook and write things down. Ask the doctor as many questions as are relevant to help you better understand your diagnoses or the plan of care. This can also help combat repeat visits to the doctor because you weren't clear on something or you forgot the directions.
To doctors I implore to listen closely to the patient. We know you're busy and you are probably one hour behind in your patients but that will mean very little to the patient or your medical board later if a mistake was made as a result of rushing. I am not immune, I can make mistakes with patients, its a statistical impossibility to avoid it, however if I were to rush through every patient to keep things on schedule or to get home on time to my family, my errors would be far greater.