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Yeah, I'm sick. Read all about it

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Re: Yeah, I'm sick. Read all about it

#31

It is sickening that a talented guy can't get a job just because he needs to work part time to manage a disease.

This is sickening: "I’m suffering from chronic pain, and there’s no way I can afford the $1,000 or so to get the physical therapy I need to manage this, much less the $15,000-30,000 I’d need to get the real treatments to fix my body."

It's not really sickening or surprising that he's having trouble getting a job though. I mean his writing seems decent enough, but is there really much demand for video game reviewers? Let alone the fact that he has to work part time, and can't be reliably counted on to attend events or even stand in front of a camera.

It would not surprise or sicken me if a perfectly healthy video game blogger couldn't find a job. This guy's situation sucks, but society and/or the government should be helping him, not some charitable employer.

Re: Yeah, I'm sick. Read all about it

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're kind of proving his point, aren't you? Your default assumption is that his roommates are probably right. What if he had crippling fibromyalgia? Or some horrendous cancer? > especially when he complains about being tired all the time He never said he complains all the time. He says he is tired; he did not say he complains that he is tired all the time. So why did you immediately conclude he must complain all th…

When he's complaining about a disease with no name, it might be worthwhile to provide a bit more medical background about the progress of his illness. Like many 'woe is me' stories on the internet, this left me with a lot more questions than answers and reading it ultimately proved to be a waste of my time. I feel sorry for the author but found his account of problems too incoherent to puzzle out, apart from the fact…

The post isn't about explaining his disease. That's just a little background info. It's not trying to defend being sick all the time, since that's really not something he should have to do. The post is just describing what it's like to be that sick all the time.

Re: Yeah, I'm sick. Read all about it

#34
This is a very unfortunate story, and it's also very unfortunate that the author hasn't been helped by medical science. The author's subjective suffering should not be up for debate. Idiopathic pain and fatigue disorders are impossibly frustrating to diagnose and treat, and have a tremendous negative impact in a person's quality of life.

That said, this post has many hallmarks of pseudoscience, and I'm afraid that the author may be invested in pseudo-scientific diagnoses to his own detriment.

For example, he is very specific about the genetic origins of his disorder and even enumerates three very specific downstream effects of his genetic polymorphisms (low catecholamine levels, 'toxin' retention, and high elimination rates of various minerals). However, any genetic disorders that are well-understood enough to detect and enumerate like this would absolutely have a name and associated diagnosis.

Furthermore, the specific factors he lists (low serotonin and dopamine, high toxin retention, high mineral elimination) map more closely to pseudoscientific principles than they do to actually medical conditions. For example, his claim that his body specifically stores 'toxins' such as benzene and mercury while 'normal' people's bodies eliminate the same toxins is a classic pseudoscientific explanation that has no basis in reality.

Again, I'm not suggesting that he isn't suffering or that his symptoms aren't actually happening. But the amount of pseudoscience in this post makes me concerned that he is moving in the wrong direction or even entering a cycle of worsening his own symptoms with his pre-occupation with pseudoscientific diagnoses and insistence that mainstream medicine can't understand his symptoms.

This is a surprisingly common scenario, common enough that it has its own diagnosis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_symptom_disorder The greatest hurdle in treating a somatic symptom disorder is convincing the patient that mental health treatment will be beneficial to their symptoms, which are largely physical. As a consequence, many sufferers turn to alternative medicine which provides comforting but largely false physical explanations for their symptoms involving disorders such as high toxin levels, low mineral levels, and low serotonin and dopamine levels, which is precisely what the author insists is causing his symptoms.

Re: Yeah, I'm sick. Read all about it

#35
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but the writer wrote a piece about how his sickness doesn't have a name, how he is REALLY REALLY sick, to the extent of going to the hospital 3 days a week. And your first comment is to essentially try to diagnose his problem as something (seemingly) relatively simple? Really? Edit: It's extremely unlikely that with his state, he hasn't known of everything we could have suggested. And since someone is sayi…

In the book "What do you care what other people think?" there's a story where Feynman had a good idea that his wife might be suffering from tuberculosis, but he restrained himself from saying anything because the symptoms were so simple and obvious that he figured the doctors had already ruled out tuberculosis as a possibility. His wife died sometime later because she was diagnosed and treated for it too late. I don'…

That doesn't match my memory of the book, nor Wikipedia's short mention that when they married they knew she had it and the prognosis wasn't great. More significantly, she died in 1945, when the first drug that could touch tuberculosis was still in the very early experimental stage.

Re: Yeah, I'm sick. Read all about it

#36

This is a very unfortunate story, and it's also very unfortunate that the author hasn't been helped by medical science. The author's subjective suffering should not be up for debate. Idiopathic pain and fatigue disorders are impossibly frustrating to diagnose and treat, and have a tremendous negative impact in a person's quality of life. That said, this post has many hallmarks of pseudoscience, and I'm afraid that th…

Pseudoscience is not necessarily bad. Most of psychology and philosophy, for instance, is essentially pseudoscience.

Re: Yeah, I'm sick. Read all about it

#37
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the book "What do you care what other people think?" there's a story where Feynman had a good idea that his wife might be suffering from tuberculosis, but he restrained himself from saying anything because the symptoms were so simple and obvious that he figured the doctors had already ruled out tuberculosis as a possibility. His wife died sometime later because she was diagnosed and treated for it too late. I don'…

That doesn't match my memory of the book, nor Wikipedia's short mention that when they married they knew she had it and the prognosis wasn't great. More significantly, she died in 1945, when the first drug that could touch tuberculosis was still in the very early experimental stage.

I remember it vividly. The story was about a doctor running up to another doctor, in front of Feynman's wife and her family, and was excited to the point of being rude, asking things like "Did you check for X?!" where X was a symptom of tuberculosis that Feynman had also noticed. The doctor was admonished for his behavior and for "making the patient feel uncomfortable" and was brushed off, even though he was on the right track and would have diagnosed the tuberculosis sooner. Feynman could have stepped in and said "Well, actually, I also noticed X," but the social pressures of the situation persuaded him to stay quiet, which turned out to be regrettable.

It probably isn't in Wikipedia because it isn't in Surely You're Joking, which is freely available online, whereas you have to buy the other book which has this story. But the story is definitely in there.

EDIT: Here's the story: http://pastebin.com/NeP4Ka70

Some summary:

...

As soon as I hear about [the disease] I go down to the library at Princeton and look up lymphatic diseases, and find “Swelling of the Lymphatic Glands. (1) Tuberculosis of the lymphatic glands. This is very easy to diagnose…”—so I figure this isn’t what Arlene has, because the doctors are having trouble trying to figure it out.

...

The county hospital gave Arlene all sorts of tests and X-ray treatments for this “Hodgkin’s disease—?” and there were special meetings to discuss this peculiar case. I remember waiting for her outside, in the hall. When the meeting was over, the nurse wheeled her out in a wheelchair. All of a sudden a little guy comes running out of the meeting room and catches up with us. “Tell me,” he says, out of breath, “do you spit up blood? Have you ever coughed up blood?” The nurse says, “Go away! Go away! What kind of thing is that to ask of a patient!”—and brushes him away. Then she turned to us and said, “That man is a doctor from the neighborhood who comes to the meetings and is always making trouble. That’s not the kind of thing to ask of a patient!” I didn’t catch on. The doctor was checking a certain possibility, and if I had been smart, I would have asked him what it was.

...

[A long time passes, and Arlene's condition worsens. The doctors finally perform a biopsy to figure out what's wrong.]

...

When I got to Arlene's house, she showed me the report. It said, “Biopsy shows tuberculosis of the lymphatic gland.” That really got me. I mean, that was the first goddamn thing on the list! I passed it by, because the book said it was easy to diagnose, and because the doctors were having so much trouble trying to figure out what it was. I assumed they had checked the obvious case. And it was the obvious case: the man who had come running out of the meeting room asking “Do you spit up blood?” had the right idea. He knew what it probably was!

I felt like a jerk, because I had passed over the obvious possibility by using circumstantial evidence—which isn’t any good—and by assuming the doctors were more intelligent than they were. Otherwise, I would have suggested it right off, and perhaps the doctor would have diagnosed Arlene’s disease way back then as “tuberculosis of the lymphatic gland—?” I was a dope. I’ve learned, since then.

Re: Yeah, I'm sick. Read all about it

#38

This is a very unfortunate story, and it's also very unfortunate that the author hasn't been helped by medical science. The author's subjective suffering should not be up for debate. Idiopathic pain and fatigue disorders are impossibly frustrating to diagnose and treat, and have a tremendous negative impact in a person's quality of life. That said, this post has many hallmarks of pseudoscience, and I'm afraid that th…

Pseudoscience is not necessarily bad. Most of psychology and philosophy, for instance, is essentially pseudoscience.

It's certainly bad when it's concerning physical medicine.

Re: Yeah, I'm sick. Read all about it

#39

This is a very unfortunate story, and it's also very unfortunate that the author hasn't been helped by medical science. The author's subjective suffering should not be up for debate. Idiopathic pain and fatigue disorders are impossibly frustrating to diagnose and treat, and have a tremendous negative impact in a person's quality of life. That said, this post has many hallmarks of pseudoscience, and I'm afraid that th…

Pseudoscience is not necessarily bad. Most of psychology and philosophy, for instance, is essentially pseudoscience.

I would disagree with this assessment. If X is not a science, it does not follow that X is a pseudoscience.

Re: Yeah, I'm sick. Read all about it

#40
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pseudoscience is not necessarily bad. Most of psychology and philosophy, for instance, is essentially pseudoscience.

I would disagree with this assessment. If X is not a science, it does not follow that X is a pseudoscience.

Pseudoscience is an un-scientific practice which people _generally assume_ to be scientific. Psychology most certainly applies, and I think the author's conclusions are the best he's got at the moment because science cannot help him.
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