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A comment on Doctors couldn't help. They turned to a shadow system of DIY medical tests.. Parent comment

Re:Doctors couldn't help. They turned to a shadow system of ... by ghaff on Monday June 10, 2024 @11:48AM (#40634847)
You don't see any benefit to having a trained/licensed professional taking vitals and making a diagnosis--even if that diagnosis is basically "you'll get better"? And the inhaler was actually helpful. And if the other option was to spend the day in a NYC ER I'd probably have passed.

I'm not a hypochondriac and maybe in a pre-COVID world I'd just have assumed I was "fine" but having a second opinion seemed warranted given the option.

I've also been in an ER when the diagnosis from an infectious disease specialist (after some really bad lab work and high fever) was basically go home, rest, and drink plenty of fluids when his assessment (of a fairly serious tropical disease) took a month to be confirmed from a lab in Paris.

So we just basically self-diagnose and assume it will all just get better?

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Re:Doctors couldn't help. They turned to a shadow system of ... by quantumwoke on Monday June 10, 2024 @12:29PM (#40635287)
A wrong diagnosis may be more harmful than you realize - if they are wrong (and they often are) it can lead to death/permanent disability.
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Re:Doctors couldn't help. They turned to a shadow system of ... by ghaff on Monday June 10, 2024 @04:19PM (#40638440)
I'm not sure what point you're making.

In one case, it would have been pretty ridiculous for me to have gone to the ER given that I didn't otherwise have COVID or other serious symptoms.

In the other case, in spite of a pretty high fever, I'm quite confident that had I gone into the local rural ER at the time they would have had zero idea about the tropical disease I had and, even after I got home with a fairly persistent mild fever, my very experienced primary care MD just knew that my blood work looked bad and it took an on-call infectious disease specialist to know what was going on.

You're not always going to have an expert specialist available.

Not that it mattered in either case because there wasn't really anything they could do other than let my body do its thing.

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