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44 sats \ 1 reply \ @gmd 30 Sep \ parent \ on: How I saved my son from a horrible medical experience (DIY medical research) DIY
I'm glad your kid is ok.
I think it is always easy to Monday morning quarterback in situations like this, but there are a ton of outside pressures that make these situations especially difficult. Your family member is not the only patient they're stressed about, they are often called out in the middle of a difficult surgery, where another patient is still under anesthesia. There can be a list of sick inpatients admitted to the hospital for which they might have 5 unanswered pages waiting for them, or another surgeon paging them for an airway emergency. If they were called in on "home call", this often means they are getting woken up throughout the night to answer pages after a full day of work, and still have to be in the hospital at 5am the next day.
The truth is if they have ~10 minutes to try to McGyver the situation before they have to move on to triage other issues, and if they have not figured it out in that time then the best course of action is to schedule surgery to definitively remove in a more controlled situation. There isn't time to sit down and do research, you have to fall back on your training or you'll never get through the day.
It worked out in your case, but waiting too long to act could quickly lead to pressure and ischemic injury that can easily snowball into severe infections and a series of far more dangerous surgeries down the road. Then the doctor gets dragged in front of a jury and dinged with a malpractice lawsuit for not acting soon enough.
Medicine would be easy if you didn't have to see 20-50 patients a day. Maybe in the future AI advisors will help with these "out of the box" situations.
I appreciate your comments. And my story is not meant to blame or accuse individual doctors - most of them (not all) are doing the best they can in a bad system.
However, in my opinion the medical/pharma system as a whole is rotten to the core. Much of what you wrote above is a symptom of the rottenness. I think it's prudent to avoid medical treatment as much as possible, and treat the whole system with suspicion and distrust. The covid disaster introduced and solidified these opinions for me.
And for SURE do your own research, and actively search for alternative opinions.
My experiences with the system have, with some exceptions, been just awful. I look forward to alternative medical systems coming into existence, with doctors that aren't beholden to the pharmaceutical complex, and who are true patient advocates.
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