15 years of funding someone else’s pensions on healthcare dividends.

H. Pylori is like one of the most common infections there is. How did your doctors not look for that?

Programmers have the benefit of being able to torture and kill our patients at scale (unit and integration testing), doctors less so. The diagnostic skills one hits in any given doctor may be relatively shallow, plus tired, overworked, or annoyed by a patients self expression… the results I’ve seen are commonly abysmal and care providers are never shocked by poor and misdiagnosis from other practitioners.

I have some statistically very common conditions and a family medical history with explicit confirmation of inheritable genetic conditions. Yet, if I explain my problems A to Z I’m a Zebra whose female hysteria has overwhelmed his basic reasoning and relationship to reality. Explained Z to A, well I can’t get past Z because, holy crap is this an obvious Horse and there’s really only one cause of Horse-itis and if your mom was a Horse then you’re Horse enough for Chronic Horse-itis.

They don’t have time to listen, their ears aren’t all that great, and the mind behind them isn’t necessarily used to complex diagnostics with misleading superficial characteristics. Fire that through a 20 min appointment, 10 of which is typing, maybe in a second language or while in pain, 6 plus month referral cycles and… presto: “it took a decade to identify the cause of the hoof prints” is how you spent your 30s and early 40s.

No clue. But H Pylori can cause many different symptoms. Sometimes it has no symptoms and people don't notice.

Anyways, that's why I'm so bullish on LLMs for healthcare.

I thought Hy.Pylori was diagnosed from a stool sample which in my experience is the first thing you’re asked for if you have any gastric issues. Was it only possible to find via the colonoscopy in your case or did the doctors never do a stool test?

The sensitivity from stool samples seems to be less than 80%. The gold standard is gastroscopy, which is often performed anyway to rule out ulcers etc. It is the first time I heard about colonoscopy for H Pylori.

Good to know, thanks!

You could do a breath test for h pylori. The colonoscopy was done as a general check by a specialist doctor. So the doctor wasn’t sure but a colonoscopy covered h pylori check.