Book/Podcast: “Am I Dying?”

[steelyman]

I made sure to qualify the title of this thread so as not to imply I am personally expecting an early departure from this “vale of tears” (phrase borrowed from my grandma).

A local radio program aired an interview with a cardiologist who co-authored a book called Am I Dying. It focuses on self-diagnosis of health problems and positives/negatives of Internet resources for doing so. I haven’t read the book but will check it out at the library.

Since there is a lot of medical advice/suggestions posted here and elsewhere I thought it might be of interest.

Quote:

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS: On health anxiety in the information age: So people obviously have been having symptoms since the beginning of people — there's nothing new there. But what is new in recent years, is your ability to just put those symptoms into a search engine and get an avalanche of information about what they might be. In our personal experience as doctors — me and my co-author — was that a lot of people were getting information that was making their anxiety extremely high unnecessarily. Many people have had the experience where you plug something into the internet, and it tells you that your hangnail is actually cancer, and that you should get your affairs in order. And so we wanted to make a resource that was much more accurate, trustworthy, has no hidden agenda and provides very practical information about whether you need to get medical care or not. And that led to the book.

https://www.wunc.org/post/am-i-dying...self-diagnoses

[braumeister]

Even when I was young a common expression was "medical student syndrome".

As aspiring physicians studied the symptoms of various diseases, they would sometimes get anxious when they recognized some of them in themselves -- even for rare diseases. The same for laymen who happened to pick up a Merck Manual or the equivalent.

[MarieIG]

With the advent of the internet, there is no going back on people researching their medical conditions. Nor, should there be. That, of course, is no substitute for seeking a care of a trained medical professional.

As for the Vale of Tears -

From Hail Holy Queen . . . To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve: to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears. . .

Hope to hear more after you've read the book.

[Gumby]

I've been slowly dying since the day I was born. Didn't need the internet to tell me that.

[Aerides]

I think this was more true a few years back. Nowadays the smart move, when feeling symptoms of something, is "don't google it!"

It must be very frustrating to be a physician with patients arguing based on what they found on webmd...

[NW-Bound]

Quote:

Vale of tears (Latin vallis lacrimarum) is a Christian phrase referring to the tribulations of life that Christian doctrine says are left behind only when one leaves the world and enters Heaven.

In that case, death should be a welcome event and something to look forward to.

For what it is worth, this concept of life being a sea of sorrow exists also in Buddhism and Hinduism, both predating Christianity.

From Wikipedia:

Dukkha (Sanskrit: duḥkha) is an important Buddhist concept, commonly translated as "suffering", "pain", "unsatisfactoriness" or "stress". It refers to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and painfulness of mundane life. It is the first of the Four Noble Truths and it is one of the three marks of existence. The term is also found in scriptures of Hinduism, such as the Upanishads, in discussions of moksha (spiritual liberation).

[socca]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aerides Nowadays the smart move, when feeling symptoms of something, is "don't google it!"

About 11 years ago, I noticed a strange lump would occasionally appear on the right side of my groin. My first thought was, "OMG I have cancer and I'm gonna die." I googled this topic and a photo of the groin of a guy with exactly the same problem appeared under the heading "inguinal hernia". After about a year I had this diagnosis confirmed by a well-respected local surgeon who specializes in hernias, who urged me to have this problem fixed by going under the knife. The good doctor neglected to tell me about post herniorraphy pain syndrome, which can ruin the life of those unfortunate folks who experience it. Fortunately, even without this info we decided (actually, I decided and he agreed) to "watch and wait". I'm still watching and waiting. I now have an occasional smaller inguinal hernia on the left side, too; both are easily reducible when they appear.

The moral of the story is that in this case the availability of medical info over the internet was crucial to the successful handling of my condition. Of course, I'm sure there are plenty of contrary stories out there for folks in the anti-medical-info-access camp.

[harley]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aerides I think this was more true a few years back. Nowadays the smart move, when feeling symptoms of something, is "don't google it!" It must be very frustrating to be a physician with patients arguing based on what they found on webmd...

I know that's true, but I'm thinking about the situation where doctors were telling people for years and years that statins didn't have any significant side effects. The internet allowed the millions(?) of people suffering from the now well known side effects to have a voice and change the medical community's perception. In this case the plural of anecdote did become data. I'm sure that the statins all going off patent protection didn't have anything to do with the recent admission of the validity of the side effect complaints.

Personally I'm glad to have the web for such stuff. In my own case I think I'm more on the positive information side of such look ups than I am on the hypochondriac side. At least by a little.

[travelover]

I had a sudden issue with my eye and I Googled the symptoms and determined that I had a problem with my retina that needed immediate attention. Had I not had that information, I might have waited to see if it cleared up as nearly everything has in my life to this point.

So, yea, you can go overboard, but at the same time it is prudent to investigate issues, especially as we age.

[NW-Bound]

I am not a hypochondriac, and in fact I tend to drag my feet in the past in seeking treatments. I want to be informed, and there's good info on the Web. It's a tool like anything else, and you can use it or abuse it.

[steelyman]

I didn’t take what the doctor/author said as being against using the Web to search for medical information, only to assess the legitimacy of the source (I think people here on e-r.org are sharp enough to do that anyway).

He mentioned sources like Mayo, Harvard, etc as being good. I bet most people have their own useful sites they’ve found over time.

It reminds me to do a little housecleaning on my bookmarks to collect links to “vetted” medical sites in one place/folder. Next time I have a hangnail I can bypass the generic Google search for information (and possible cancer diagnosis).

[H2ODude]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aerides I think this was more true a few years back. Nowadays the smart move, when feeling symptoms of something, is "don't google it!" It must be very frustrating to be a physician with patients arguing based on what they found on webmd...

I would think the greater frustration of Drs. would be the string of patients asking "Is drug ____ right for me?"

[Tadpole]

I don't know how anyone deconvolutes cryptic shared test results without a medical degree or even a specialty degree. From a recent neck MRI (not mine), terms used for one section that have no meaning, in the context, to me:
C2-3
endplate osteophytes
bilateral uncovertebral hypertrophy
left-sided facet hypertrophy
left-sided neural foraminal narrowing

Even after looking up the terminology, I was left with only a fuzzy idea of the wholistic view.

What I use the internet for, mostly, is checking drug safety when using OTC remedies. I do try to ask what might pain behind my ear mean but I have never really found a concrete answer asking such vague questions.

[bolt]

As Gumby suggests I too suspect we're all born dying, with an affliction called aging*.
Yet people whom live extraordinarily long lives(100+) are called super agers*.
Lifestyle certainly has an effect.

Concerning language as with numerous niches like autos, finance, I.T. & medicine.
All seem to have an insiders terminology 'speak' to folks not well versed in them afaik.

[googily]

I think having Google is a great way to become more informed about what you are facing, or to be ready for all possibilities. But you have to yourself be informed about the sources that you are using, and understand the notion of odds, etc.

I am an intense user of Google for symptoms (of which, alas, I have many). But I would never ever go to a doctor and say: "I have this symptom, is it this?" Mainly because I know they bristle in the face of Dr. Google. But it does allow me to be ready for whatever I might hear.

I'm actually going through this right now--a screening mammogram found an area of "architectural distortion" a few weeks back. I Googled it, and read many research papers, enough to see that it's generally thought that 75% of all ADs turn out to be cancerous. But it had been seen on a 3D mammo, and research on *that* says it's more like 50% chance of cancer. So I went back for the diagnostic mammogram, and was fully prepared for them to then say they wanted an ultrasound, which they did, and then was fully prepared for when they said they wanted to do a needle biopsy, which they did. And when they told me the biopsy showed a (benign) complex sclerosing lesion, a little Googling let me to understand why they still want to do an open/excisional biopsy, taking the whole area out, because there's a small chance (somewhere between 10-30%) that there could be cancer cells on the edges, away from where the needle biopsied. And even within that 10-30%, the most likely outcome is for "stage 0" cancer.

So, while I'm a mite nervous (excision is this week), I'm not freaking out, and am prepared for what might come my way.

But I also know I'm a weirdo and that not everyone can dispassionately consume piles of statistics and data.

[Scrapr]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aerides I think this was more true a few years back. Nowadays the smart move, when feeling symptoms of something, is "don't google it!" It must be very frustrating to be a physician with patients arguing based on what they found on webmd...

When Mrs Scrapr was initially Dx with Esophageal cancer I peeked online for a minute. Saw prognosis was poor. I never looked again. Never told her either. We tried to let the facts on the ground determine our responses along with the docs

[O2Bfree]

Or maybe sometimes a person will see an internet diagnosis that's more serious than they'll believe, and seek out info to convince themselves that their symptoms are caused by something less serious. I did this for several years with my SVT, convincing myself that my racing heart was caused by hormonal changes, when actually I had a treatable heart condition. A heart problem...me?? After all those years of exercise?? No way!!!

[Rianne]

I listened to the interview, great thread. I was disappointed when asked about nausea, Dr. Kelly referred to several causes (he did say there are many). He did not mention gas, constipation, spicy food, overeating, exhaustion etc. Haha, let the gas go! Jim Gaffigan tried to differentiate between gas pain and an appendicitis in his latest Amazon Prime special.

Anyway, I have an inherited kidney disease called PKD. Statistical lifespan, 72 yrs. old. My DM with the disease lived to 93. I have weekly coffee with a DF, sometimes our conversations are 2 hours long, so I consider it therapy (free therapy). She told me I have the healthiest attitude towards death than anyone she's known. My thoughts generally go towards the concern of "will it be fast? will it be painful? if it's slow, there are meds, and everyone dies alone, so you better like yourself because that's who you spend your life with and that's who you die with." No one has ever proved me wrong.

[PawPrint53]

I have a rare neurological disorder that my family doctor wasn't familiar with so it took a year of trying different treatments that didn't work. I ended up looking online and brought her a printout of what I thought I had. She sent me to a neurologist, and I got the official diagnosis. So I always say that I diagnosed my condition with help from the Internet.