Mystery Medical Diagnoses

I'm a big fan of the Learning Channel show "Mystery Diagnosis." Each show follows two cases that went undiagnosed (or misdiagnosed) for a significant period of time. Luckily they finally find a doctor who has his/her head screwed on frontwards and are given the proper treatment. Naturally, the ones who die before finding a decent doctor never make it to the show. They are the folks you see on Dr. G, the central Texas coroner; she solves mysterious deaths one at a time. (Her real name, Garavaglia, is virtually unpronounceable.)

"Mystery Diagnosis" has one big flaw. They never tell you the names of the noodnick doctors who screw it up, so the instant they introduce someone by their real name, you know the proper diagnosis is at hand!

My TiVo offered me about six shows tonight and got me to wondering why doctors don't just surf the web to correlate symptoms. Well, presumably they have better search capabilities in some on-line medical dictionary somewhere, but I decided that Google could do almost as well.

One case tonight involved a female college student, early 20s, who developed a cough that wouldn't go away with antibiotics. Well, not for long, anyway. She was constantly fatigued. Her chest X-ray showed what looked like a mild case of pneumonia. She later developed extreme fatigue, itchy skin and night sweats. If you put all of those symptoms into Google, two big possibilities pop out, AIDs and Lymphoma, with the latter being the closest match because AIDS has a lot more symptoms. Sure enough, by the time she was properly diagnosed three years later, she had a football-sized tumor in her right lung.

Makes you wonder about doctors.

Another episode of "Mystery Diagnosis" concerned a very young child whose breathing and heart often stopped. Her mother was taught CPR and she was constantly calling EMS. A few years later, the child developed a harlequin disease where one side of the body flushed red and the other remained normal, accompanied by extreme pain. The child's mother found the diagosis on the web and told her doctor what it was: PEPD, Paroxysmal Extreme Pain Disorder, a genetic mutation known to affect only eight people in the world.

Yet anthor episode got the correct diagnosis from a local doctor. It was Schwannoma. The mother used the Internet to find the best surgeon in the United States to remove the tumor.

Don't forget to surf the web if you feel out of sorts. Having said that, be careful because, in most of the examples above, it took years of searching before the correct answer was found. It's not clear if that resulted from tenacity or the maturation of the web. However, I can say that several years ago, I came down with shingles. The web, in particular an Australian web site that cost a few dollars, was absolutely no help. But a call to my doctor's nurse diagnosed it in a few minutes.

OK, so it's not all web surfing, it's also channel surfing. TV still has a few uses.