In the end I rationalized my decision by thinking that if my post isn't actually appropriate, that it simply wouldn't get voted up. It's a community site, and in the end the community chose to vote it up. I think that's worth something, though I certainly do see your point.

I'd make one correction to your argument though- I'm trying to crowdsource a diagnosis, not my medical care. There is a big difference.

Its a very interesting case and I've enjoyed following it, so please keep updating us. And best of luck with your continued recovery!

Nothing can be more important that saving a life so your threads are not only appropriate, they are most welcome.

I don't know if I could be as brave as you are in your quest, but obviously you have been through quite a bit and I trust you know what you're doing.

I consider diagnosis to be a subset of health care, hence my concern. Take everything here with a grain of salt. I hope you find a trusted health care professional, and more importantly, good health. Best wishes.

It is indeed hard to know what to make of a lot of the suggestions I receive here, but the quality level of the comments is way above the kind of discussion you would get in most places by posting such a story ("have you tried crystals or magnets?") Already it has turned up something (Celiac) that apparently has been entirely overlooked by all of the doctors I have seen thus far. Even if that turns out to be a dead end, it's worth knowing about and investigating.

Keep in mind, too, though, you may not have one definitive diagnosis. You could have _______ and also ________, or ________ caused by ________, which then makes ________ worse. The body is a complicated thing.

And like edw519 said, the first post was much more interesting than the average HN post, so I say keep 'em coming.

I didn't interpret the update which said he had been to a doctor and had another appointment soon as him expecting us to have too large a role.

If there is one bias that intelligent, technologically oriented people suffer from, it's an over-confidence in medicine and an excessively mechanistic view of the human body. The body is more like an aquarium full of a variety of species than an engine in which a part may or may not function.

Having said that, no one modality is better than the other. Each one has its own place.

There is one more striking difference also between the Western and other modalities and You made it clear by using the word "fix".

For certain conditions, "fixing" does not work. If my arm is broken, sure you can fix it but for chronic conditions, certain lifestyle changes will have to be made and that requires the individual to be willing to undertake shifts in their behavior. For example, what you eat, when you eat, where you eat, how the food is cooked, when you sleep, the ambiance of your work, home and not to mention exercising etc.

So in that sense, the holistic medical practitioner becomes more like a guide and the individual takes on a active role.

For most people, this is too much to do. So they prefer Western Medicine where the mindset is, someone is going to "fix" me while I am busy with my life getting stressed up. The role is passive. Big difference.

It is funny that Western Medicine practitioners are called doctors whereas holistic practitioners use the term heal and are called healers. (The root of the word heal is related to whole)

Now that Western medicine has got most of the low-hanging fruit and is now banging its head on the hard problems, it may appear to fall short in the "what have you done for me lately?" sense. But that's just because we take it for granted that we aren't going to get polio or smallpox.

A lot of Western treatments for chronic conditions aren't that great, but is there anything that's been proven better? It's not exceptionally pleasant for people with sleep apnea to have to wear masks and have pressurized air blown into their breathing passages at night, but at least they get some real sleep. Living with diabetes still sucks, but wouldn't it suck more without the treatments scientific medicine has developed?

[1] "Western medicine" is really a bad name for it. My specific condition was first discovered by a Japanese doctor, hence the name Hashimoto's thyroiditis.

Of course, that's not going to accomplish anything if my immune system has decided to destroy my thyroid gland, or if a stray gamma ray or two has turned a lump of otherwise-useful tissue into a malignant tumor, or if my breathing passages are shaped in just the right way to obstruct my breathing at night.

Though I am not going to start another controversial thread (about homeopathy), I just wonder why the mainstream medical science does not looks at human malfunctioning as a whole system. In other words why there are so many organ/tissues/functions specialists?

May be (with main stream medical science) we are on wrong path and have made things so complicated that it has impossible to consider the whole human body in one shot in any particular disease. Though we fully know that analyzing/treating the parts in a complex system won't take us too far.

I'm only answering this part, because I also don't want to get involved in a homeopathy debate.

They do look at human malfunctioning as a whole system. The people who do this are called "internists". Your primary doctor is probably one of them.

The reason that there are so many specialists is that the human body is really complicated. As much as we would like it to be simple, there's just too much to know about it for any one person to know everything, even if all the information is available. For the same reason that mechanical engineers specialize in things like mechanism design, aerodynamics, or materials, doctors specialize in different areas of the body. An internist simply does not know enough to figure out everything that could possibly be going wrong with a person's body.

To my mind, the big problem is not with the specialization; it's with the coordination. All of the above specialties, and more, were involved in the design of any given vehicle you're likely to encounter, from a performance bicycle to the Concorde. Yet, it's really hard to get doctors from different specialties to collaborate to tackle a complicated disease. This is not a problem with medical science, so much as a problem with the way things are done right now.

Of course, for very common symptoms (like headache and nausea), they usually just treat the symptom.

I think you should clarify what you mean by homeopathy before arguing that it is superior. I suppose it's possible that someone administering homeopathic remedies may have a belief about the body as a whole, but I think it's a stretch to consider homeopathy an improvement on western medicine in any way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0W7Jbc_Vhw

The crowd will tell have him running around getting tested for everything from celiac to Grave's disease. When the tests turn up negative, the crowd will claim that the testing threshold is wrong, or that doctors just can't be trusted. He will be told to try everything from vitamin B12 shots, to allergy medication, eat more kale and bananas. Perhaps if someone recently read a weston price website he will be advised to eat pork chops and drink buttermilk. Maybe polyphasic sleep is the answer? Or maybe light therapy and a white noise generator? At least this is Hacker News so nobody is recommending cupping or leeches or magnetic wristbands... yet. Asking the internet is like a schizophrenic consulting with the voices in his head. Every fruitcake idea will be presented with equal weight.

With that said, my contribution to the noise is that if these symptoms have been there for 18 years and haven't killed him, it's probably psychological.

By that logic, any chronic disease is psychological.

There are a lot of very smart people here and I think it was a great idea to come here. If the OP is smart enough to not take everything said as a cure, they could very well gain some very valuable bit of knowledge that could lead them on the right path; just like starting with Wikipedia.

In fact, if the diagnosis differs from what the computer says, then this should always be reported. Failure to do so should be considered a criminal offense.

Penalties are certainly a mistake in the case of your statement, as you haven't really outlined any computerized diagnostic system that is accurate on the entire range of human maladies, is available to all, and that can account for all of the fuzziness of reporting symptoms (just to name a few obstacles).

But I can't see at all where you're coming from when you say criminal offense. This would suggest that doctors should be locked up?

Then you feed it all the symptoms, sometimes it asks questions, and gives you a list of causes sorted by probability.

It works almost exactly like this game http://www.guessthename.com/

Apparently the biggest problem with it is that doctors won't use it.

The second problem is feeding data - you basically have to parse every medical paper ever published.

Here's a patent: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6607482.html

There are lots of a papers, and a small number of working prototypes, but I have not heard of any that are actually being used.