You know, it’s taken me awhile to come to this realization, but dropping out of graduate school, losing your career, not having your intended children, and being bedridden for seven years because your neurologists fucked up is…kind of a big fucking deal.
It strikes me as an outcome that should maybe be…counted in aggregate statistics, and that people should be held accountable. Instead, it is 100% invisible to the medical system, the cost borne entirely by myself, my family, and our society. And there are MILLIONS of us.
I was reflecting on my Twitter feed and why I rail on about this. It occurred to me it’s because this (right now) is the only space where this reality can exist. If you counted us and there was accountability for medical fuck-ups/neglect/gaslighting/abuse etc., I’d have no need.
But right now, medicine is (one of the last) noble priesthoods, with all the self-awareness and accountability that noble priesthoods usually entail. (i.e., scant.) And yes, there are absolutely incredible doctors out there, but they are not the norm.
We need to stop automatically lionizing whole classes of people just because we are terrified of disability and death and want to believe in the magic/superiority/infallibility of our doctors or our medical systems (cough, NHS) and start to see things as they really are.
It is ugly, and by the time you get sick, it’s too late to start caring.
Our whole society has contributed to this: the med schools that use absolutely the wrong admissions criteria and curricula; the residency hazing; the shitty systems of rationing that oppress doctors and distort science and reality; the TV fairytales we tell about it all.
By “neurologists fucked up” I mean diagnosed you with hysteria rather than observing the patent abnormalities on your MRI, ordering additional testing, or doing fairly basic clinical exams and *believing the results.*
(No, their diagnostic algorithms do not train them to do this but they still have eyes and brains.)
I wonder how different my life might have been if rather than reach for the easy “nothing to see here” Get Out of Jail Free card, my doctors had kept working under the premise that I WAS SICK.
That truly only happens on TV. Most patients with most doctors get one, maybe two tests. If the answer isn’t blatantly obvious, you basically get kicked to the curb. True investigation and observation doesn’t really exist in modern medicine, not for the average patient.
I have no answers or solutions, but I know that it all starts with seeing the problem, which requires measurement, which is not going to be initiated from within the healthcare system itself. It also requires forcing the medical system to internalize the costs.

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More from @jenbrea

27 Jun
.@verified I truly do not understand why I was verified but my husband @owasow was not. He was probably (characteristically) too modest.
[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Wasow
[2] google.com/search?q=%22om…
While yes, it’s hardly the most important thing, there are some helpful interface features you can access when verified. @owasow misses important tweets from @verified accounts all the time because they get lost in the sea of commentary/interaction.
If you have a @verified account (or even if you don’t!) please give @owasow a little love…maybe the @Twitter gods will smile on him😂. Thank you.🙏🏼
Read 4 tweets
22 Jun
You could replace “Long COVID” with “all illnesses that are a) chronic and b) not a top 10 or 20 most common illness. Doctors deny illnesses *every day*, including illnesses that are in textbooks and have ICD codes.
If there’s not a clear, paint-by-numbers Up-to-Date algorithm or NHS guideline (which there aren‘t for MANY conditions, for MANY reasons), or if those guidelines are at odds with science, you are very much out of luck.
And it’s not just “contested illnesses.” 25-30 million Americans have a rare disease, and many of them either have no healthcare or find navigating the healthcare system extremely dangerous.
Read 7 tweets
25 Jan
We should take some of the most replicated findings in #MECFS and study them in #longCOVID patients. Some of these findings, if also present in #longCOVID, *could* potentially imply avenues for symptom management or therapeutic treatment.
Here are a few that might be interesting:
1️⃣Low serum carnitine: me-pedia.org/wiki/Carnitine
2️⃣ Low natural killer cell function: me-pedia.org/wiki/Natural_k…
3️⃣ Elevated lactate (blood, brain): me-pedia.org/wiki/Lactic_ac…
4️⃣ Cerebral hypoperfusion: me-pedia.org/wiki/Brain#Blo…
Read 25 tweets
23 Jan
A little at a loss for words. I don’t disagree with everything she is saying—it’s important to recognize that hypermobility is a widespread trait in the population and doesn’t necessarily mean disability—but ppl w/ EDS see these traits all around them. Image
If these associations haven’t been well-established in the literature, perhaps that’s important work to fund?

Hoping @exceedhergrasp1 that your work can touch on this.
Talk on #hEDS, FII, and child abuse, taking a critical eye toward how hEDS diagnosis in kids may be being used to shelter abusive parents from child protection proceedings:
Read 6 tweets
3 Jan
I agree with this. Part of the problem, though, is many of us have symptoms that our primary care doctor isn’t comfortable with. I’ve gone to urgent care before only to be sent to the ER. Eventually you learn that you are supposed to go home and “live with it” until you die.
There is no place in the medical system for people living with dangerous (but not immediately life-threatening) symptoms. Many of us need hospital admission, testing, and observation, but that essentially never happens.
I am sure there are other examples, but if you have Chiari, CCI/AAI, and/or occult tethered cord causing intermittent paralysis, severe central apnea/Ondine’s curse, dysphagia, blackouts, the ER will not take you. Neurology will not treat you. You can die, but you probably won’t.
Read 7 tweets
9 Dec 20
Genuine question: why is it so difficult for doctors to believe patients who are having a hard time breathing, not due to lung or cardiovascular problems, but rather, central apnea? It seems to be a fairly simple problem to demonstrate and measure.
Central apnea was one of my main complaints following my thyroidectomy. When I laid flat on my back, I would become paralyzed and locked in a perpetual cycle of repeated apneas lasting 30-60 seconds.
We had no idea what was going on—it is truly terrifying to not be able to tell your diaphragm muscles to contract at will—and after a few days, it seemed to be getting worse. I stopped being able to sleep, so one night, we went to the ER.
Read 18 tweets

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