let me fucking tell you a thing about self-diagnosis.
I have kidney stones, that if not medically removed, would kill me, and this has happened several times.
I’ve had them since I was 16, I’d go to doctors, they’d say, oh it’s your period, I’d go to another doctor, they’d say, oh it’s a UTI
it was not until I googled and searched up my particular symptoms, that I figured, hey, it might be kidney stones.
So I told a doctor, I’m like, hey I might have kidney stones, and so they’re like, lets do an ultrasound, nothing showed up. And so the doctor was like, I guess not.
And I’m like fuck, I wonder what it could be then, until I googled it, and found out that sometimes kidney stones don’t show up in ultrasounds.
If I didn’t google that particular information I would have died, because they wouldn’t have taken a cat scan and found MY GIANT FUCKING STONES blowing my kidney the fuck up.
Self-diagnosis SAVES LIVES, it saved my life, and it saves millions of others.
If people know there is something wrong with their bodies, and doctors continuously blow them off, if those people don’t look into it, or have someone help them look into it, they can very easily end up dead.
Doctors are NOTORIOUS for blowing people off.
yup. I have multiple chronic illnesses and when I was trying to figure out what was wrong, and why I was eating more than usual but losing weight really fast, and why I had crippling chest pain and fatigue, my doctor told me it was “stress”.
And that’s before my other doctor, the one I go to at college, gave me handouts on Anorexia and suggested counseling.
And that’s before a fucking specialist told me that while I fit literally every diagnostic box for one of my illnesses “it’s inconclusive”. My parents had to yell at him before he agreed to even diagnose me.
By that point I had lost about 15% of my body weight and could barely make it to my classes. My current specialist seriously thought about hospitalizing me.
Fuck doctors.
This kinda shit isn’t even uncommon is the whole thing. If you aren’t actively researching your symptoms, or have someone helping you actively research your symptoms, you can quite literally die.
my lung had collapsed a few years ago and when i went to the er to let a doctor know he said that it probably wasnt collapsed since i had no reason for it to collapse (other than it running in my fucking family which is why i was able to catch it) and he did all the regular tests and kept saying i was probably just having allergies and i kept telling him it wasnt allergies because it didnt feel like allergies. it wasnt until we demanded an xray and the doctor saw that it was indeed collapsed that they finally listened. if we didnt demand the xray then i probably would be dead because the doctor was ready to send me home with a collapsed lung.