Teen Diagnoses Her Own Disease In Science Class 582
18-year-old Jessica Terry suffered from stomach pain, diarrhea, vomiting and fever for eight years. She often missed school and her doctors were unable to figure out the cause of her sickness. Then one day in January someone was finally figured out what was wrong with Jessica. That person was her. While looking under a microscope at slides of her own intestinal tissue in her AP science class, Jessica noticed an area of inflamed tissue called a granuloma, which is an indication of Crohn's disease. "It's weird I had to solve my own medical problem," Terry told CNN affiliate KOMO in Seattle, Washington. "There were just no answers anywhere. ... I was always sick."
Re:Where did she get the intestinal tissue? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hmm (Score:1, Informative)
Yes, the "for eight years" is a giveaway... And yes, i am a doctor... Though an *european* one...
What did they think it was? (Score:5, Informative)
If you go to "My Electronic MD (dot com)", tell it you're a female, and give it the symptoms "chronic diarrhea" and "fever," Crohn's Disease is the first of three things to pop up, along with Ulcerative Colitis and Infectious Colitis.
Of course, anyone can diagnose him or herself with a computer. It's encouraging that this young woman did it with a microscope.
Not quite as easy as it seems (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe you guys instantly thought Crohn's, but there are plenty of other rarer diseases it could have been. Without a positive biopsy it would have been incredibly immoral to slap a Crohn's diagnosis on this girl and medicated her for it. It would have proved interesting were she have had say tropic sprue [wikipedia.org] and you were to treat her with the immunosupressants.
Not weird at all (Score:3, Informative)
I live in Australia. Not a 3rd world country, or so we like to think. The standard of medical care here has been on the decline for a long time. I have seen some of it first hand. I won't repeat my first hand accounts here again because the last time I did I got called a liar.
That's not to say there are no good doctors and that no one cares. They're just few and far between working under a system starved of resources. Wose, the medical profession tends to work against the patient - if you self diagnose you're thought of as a crackpot. As if giving a damn about your own well being makes you a hypochondriac. I fear it's only going to get worse.
Re:Hmm (Score:1, Informative)
Interesting: while reading about her symptoms, Crohn's Disease was the first think that came to my mind. And no, I'm not a doctor. So what kind of doctors were seeing her? Veterinary ones?
Without an AP science class, it took me 45 years to get a diagnosis for Chrohn's/Colitis.
Yes, many if not most doctors are that worthless.
The article says they had been taken for pathology (Score:5, Informative)
"she was looking under the microscope at slides of her own intestinal tissue -- slides her pathologist had said were completely normal"
Re:Not quite as easy as it seems (Score:5, Informative)
"...slides her pathologist had said were completely normal..."
So to me it sounds like the doctors missed it if she could find it on those slides.
Re:Not quite as easy as it seems (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Surprised? (Score:3, Informative)
I have yet to hear about an 18-year-old european that had to diagnose her/himself. I don't know what that proves. I'm just saying.
And before today, I had not heard of an 18-year-old American that had to diagnose her/himself. Although, that doesn't prove anything.
From TFA:
"As I get older, the disease can get worse," Terry told KOMO.
Crohn's disease is often misdiagnosed or diagnosed very late, says Dr. Corey Siegel, director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
"Granulomas are oftentimes very hard to find and not always even present at all," Siegel said. "I commend Jessica for her meticulous work."
Sounds like it's not that unusual to miss this early on. I assume the symptoms are not that pronounced until later in life and are not that obvious early on. Many diseases are this way. Breast cancer is usually not detected until a lump is felt or becomes visible via X-ray.
not enough information was:Re:Surprised? (Score:3, Informative)
how come it wasn't diagnosed?
We don't have enough information to know why it wasn't diagnosed. It said that she had the symptoms for 8 years, but it doesn't say how many doctors she saw about them, or where or when. This could just as easily be a communications breakdown as much as a problem with quack doctors; if she changed doctors over the 8 years (which is a common patient reaction when they have undiagnosed problems) then the records might not have followed her completely. For that matter the article doesn't say if the family ever moved in the last 8 years; it is unfortunately rather common for patient's records to be incompletely copied from one clinic to another when patients change their primary care providers.
Also worth noting from the article:
Crohn's disease is often misdiagnosed or diagnosed very late, says Dr. Corey Siegel, director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
"Granulomas are oftentimes very hard to find and not always even present at all," Siegel said. "I commend Jessica for her meticulous work."
Re:it's called evolution... (Score:5, Informative)
True but most rich people didn't inherit their wealth (http://www.smartmoney.com/spending/rip-offs/10-things-millionaires-wont-tell-you-23697/ "or take the most common path: running your own business. That's how half of all millionaires made their money, according to the AmEx/Harrison survey. About a third had a professional practice or worked in the corporate world; only 3 percent inherited their wealth.").
Re:Surprised? (Score:5, Informative)
According to the article her pathologist gave her the slides for the class project.
Re:What did they think it was? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This does her no good... (Score:3, Informative)
As someone with severe Crohn's Disease, I can say that it's important that you don't over look the exact phrase you mentioned: controlling symptoms dramatically increases quality of life, and preventing relapse reduces the damage to her intestines and will in turn hopefully reduce the number of surgeries she will need later on in life. So yes, I'd say that while she can't cure her Crohn's, now that she has an arsenal of medications at her disposal, there's plenty that she can do about it.
Re:it's called evolution... (Score:2, Informative)
So either A) you don't have money, and wouldn't have gotten treatment under either system, or B) you do have money and can still afford to cut out your own cancer.
Sounds good to me.
Re:Remeber it is practicing (Score:5, Informative)
Slightly offtopic rant: IAAP (I Am A Physician), and we have to practice statistical medicine. But first and foremost, we have to listen to our patients. A good story beats statistics 9 times out of 10. But that means we get burnt 10 percent of the time. The patient population understands that. The health care industry understands that.
There's the old saying, "If you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, not zebras". If you want to practice medicine in a different way, go for it.
Re:They couldn't diagnose her? (Score:3, Informative)
The disease affects each person differently. I got diagnosed with it about 5 years ago and did not have the usual symptoms. I developed some pain in my abdomen that I initially thought was a pulled muscle ... it got progressively worse over a couple of days and I ended up going to the emergency room. As it turns, out my small intestine had ruptured and a large abscess had formed in my abdomen. The following day a surgeon removed about 30 cm of my ileum as well as about 15 cm of the lower part of my colon. I've been in remission ever since and have not experienced any other problems. However, a biopsy did confirm that I have Crohn's. I've been on 50 mg of azathioprine since then and also have to get monthly B-12 injections because my body can no longer absorb that vitamin properly (most of it is absorbed in the ileum).
A friend of mine has been suffering with it since he was a teenager (he's in his 40's now). He has had multiple surgeries and his colon is in horrible shape. Because of his condition he now has a permanent ileostomy and no longer has the use of his colon.
If you are interested in a really severs case, please read the story of "RandyNoGuts" ... http://www.randynoguts.com/ [randynoguts.com]
I feel pretty lucky to have gotten off with a "mild" case, but there are many thousands of people who are not so lucky.
Re:Remeber it is practicing (Score:5, Informative)
Me: I'm having seizures.
Doc: No, you're not.
After six years, four doctors, and one car crash, I finally get hooked up to an EEG machine.
Doc: Oh, hey, check this out. You have epilepsy.
Me: I know. I told YOU that.
Re:Remeber it is practicing (Score:3, Informative)
"If you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, not zebras"
Unless of course, you live in Africa. Then it could be anything from antelope to wildebeest. Not to mention zebras.
Statistical medicine is all well and good for making sure you get the best probability of curing the problem on the first shot, but too many doctors seem to get fixated on the initial diagnosis (or lack thereof) and don't continue the investigation for less likely scenarios.
In the case of the original article, this looks more like a case where the pathologist missed the granuloma that the student spotted. So it was more a case of hearing the hoofbeats, but not getting a good view to see if the animal had stripes. Apparently spotting a granuloma is a black art comparable to scanning a mammogram.