Doctors dismissed her, but she turned out to be right after years of needless suffering

[conuly]

Surprise, surprise, she was overweight, therefore, various doctors insisted the answer to all her problems was to lose weight.

There's a million more patients with stories just like this. Whenever you hear somebody confidently and disdainfully assert that you can't be healthy if you're overweight because "it's just facts" that "science proves" that being overweight increases your risk of serious illness leading to death, ask yourself if that person has adequately accounted for medical bias.

I'm not saying that being overweight isn't a risk factor for early death - but how big is it really? The answer is unknowable until we weed out this sort of nonsense from medicine.

Comments

[thewayne]

25 lbs is not horribly overweight. Geez.

I had a similar runaround with my pneumonias. I had pneumonia twice and a lung doctor dismissed two sets of before and after x-rays, along with two sets of radiology reports stating left lower lobe pneumonia, and two sets of bloodwork showing elevated white blood cell counts - as bronchitis. He was fired. Two days after seeing him? Pneumonia #3 struck. Not that he could have prevented it, it clearly was percolating at the moment I saw him.

Even the immunologist whom I FINALLY got in to see wanted to blame it on bronchitis. He was an environmental/industrial immunologist/allergist. My wife had to brow-beat him in to ordering an antibody test, which showed my immunoglobulin levels were all-but zero. "I guess you do have CVID!" DUH!

I can understand doctors don't like being second-guessed at their profession and probably have more than their share of hypochondriacs coming in with a list of their illnesses, all wrong. BUT SOMETIMES WE'RE RIGHT!

[conuly]

And for all that they scoff at "Dr. Google", the fact is that if you have a rare disease, you're pretty likely to have to do your own research and give yourself your own self-diagnosis before you visit a specialist, because doctors are trained not to consider rare diseases.

[thewayne]

For me, it's usual for immune disorders to be caught in childhood, so pediatricians are trained to look for them.  But 10%+ of immune compromised people are adults!  So adult doctors easily miss them and attribute them to something else, causing a lot of suffering and additional - sometimes permanent - damage!  It can take SIX YEARS for immune disorders to get correctly diagnosed in adults, fortunately it only took about four months for us to push and get it done for me. Now, in my case, my specific flavor - hypogammaglobulinemia - was only formally categorized in the 1950s.  As I was born in '61, and my condition wasn't fully manifest in my childhood - and knowing that it was highly unlikely that my pediatrician was trained in childhood immunological problems - it's not reasonable to expect that it could have been caught in my childhood.  Plus, treatment back then really sucked.  And there is no cure, just maintenance treatment.

Us CVID (Common Variable Immuno-Deficiency) people know well that we have to be our own advocates and to be pushy.  Fortunately I now have a really good immunologist.  The immunologist who first wanted to diagnose me as having had bronchitis retired.