Do you have a disenfranchised medical struggle -- a real, long-term problem that seriously affects your quality of life but nobody would ever talk about in public? Has its disenfranchisement affected the quality of healthcare available to you?
medical, g.i.
@bobbyd0g
my wife did for about a decade — cyclic vomiting attacks, only resolved when her compounding health problems led to nearly-fatal liver failure
basically nobody would believe her on "i can only keep down like <500 calories most days" so none of the many doctors she saw felt any sense of urgency about treating this
medical, g.i.
@bobbyd0g
for a few years we could get 1-2 doses of a hardcore antiemetic at hospital urgent care, then they stopped doing that
all of her long-term doctors would be like, "we should treat the causes, not the symptoms" and then just kinda shrug and do nothing when they couldn't figure out the cause
most doctors' entire knowledge of cyclic vomiting type conditions seems to be "i heard once it is caused by weed"
medical, g.i.
@saddestrobots Zofran may not be THE answer, but it's AN answer… Funny how doctors are so negatively ethical and that commitment often just vanishes before a challenge. And yeah that last one kills me because the sativa is the reason I eat every day. at least twice! i ❤️ 🌲
medical, g.i.
@saddestrobots I feel like this is a common thread -- a failure for doctors to recognize the cumulative effects of things they economically overlook could add up to fatal risks. Any one factor could reduce a person's ability to tolerate and attend to the others that can fall like dominoes. Dietary considerations can be some of the most insidious. I discovered my rock-bottom weight in 2019 when my appetite vanished; a leaf in the wind could have pushed me over
medical, malnutrition
@bobbyd0g
it's disabling! sometimes you can't walk!!
My answer is yes and yes; as someone with a lifetime of GI maladies, I've come to know the meaning of years of torture in silence unaided by flippant or clueless doctors. In fact, it's possible the only reason I'm alive today is that some regular people demanded the science and practice finally advance on the 1980s lipid model that gave us all fat-free diets and type 2 diabetes. I've been through many things like this and I get the feeling it's more common than most would expect.