by Gelert » Thu Sep 20, 2007 9:07 pm
lol. Yeah. My point comes from two things
1. I'm gaining an awareness of how difficult it can be to accurately diagnose a condition when someone presents in your tent/office/tipi or whatever with symptoms, you can poke them around and take vital signs, ask them questions, tell when they're lying and wheedle the truth out and all kinds of things. A doctor often has the facilities to do lab analysis. A doctor will have decades of training and experience.
Incidentally, do nurses, with considerable training and experience get to diagnose conditions when a doctor is obtainable - no. I've spent the last week in pissing rain learning to put in drips, stitches, oxygen, evacuating spinal casualties and doing diagnoses. If someone comes to me with anything upon thorough examination that I am not certain what it is and that I can sort upon the basis of my training and available facilities, am I going to refer them to a doctor ASAP. Hell yeah.
2. Responsibility. If you tell someone to take some course of action and they later on die because they've had false reassurance, at the very least you will feel bad about it. These days, chances are you'll maybe feel a lot poorer. Ignorance and incompetence is not a defence in medical law. You can't rely on saying well, someone was enough of a numpty to trust me, so they had it coming.
So what the rusty fuck are we doing relying on people without diagnostic myopia in some cases, and most cases no medical training and experience, via the etheral medium of an internet board to do such an important and dangerous task?
Consider the case of someone a few weeks back posting with problems with altered sensation and repeated fainting. Everybody leapt after diet, fair enough, it's a vegan board so we will be a bit keen about it. Did anyone consider the possibility of facts not to hand - such as medication the person was on, whether they hit their head at any point, whether they had a history of vascular, heart or neurological conditions or had the potential to be experiencing rather serious medical problems way beyond a slightly dodgy diet? No. Could we tell if they had? No. Is that person going away thinking, hmm must eat better and then getting an awful shock if something serious is wrong? Yes.
Mate, seriously, it's common sense. It may say in the small print somewhere, but at least put a big sticky message in the subforum to the effect that the first port of call of medical advice should be going to see a doctor. Sooner or later some well-meant advice is going to hurt someone, do we really want that?
I'm not saying this out of some secret kinky manlust for doctors, in fact as a profession I don't fucking like 'em. At all. But it's what they're there, it's what we pay them for. And they're supposed to be better at doing it than average member of the public.
Yet at a time when there is an epidemic of mistrust in the medical profession there is a corresponding epidemic of blind faith in asking J. Bloggs to do what doctors (usually) get paid shitloads to do. How does that work?
So, fucking hell, yeah I am going to keep saying it on every thread unless you ask me to stop, because the fact people are asking implies they aren't going to the doctor. If someone feels bad enough to share a complaint with the internet, unless they're hypochondriacs, usually it is worth being safer about rather than sorry. That is, get qualified medical attention in person.
I'm sorry to keep ramming it forward because quite frankly it is boring, and I appreciate the international situation is varied with respect to getting medical help, but there are still options there, and they should be exhausted first before relying on us muppets.
It already has a disclaimer in the forum description:
