My ex wife diagnosed herself (correctly) not off WebMD but at the local medical school library.
She was tired of scores of doctors doing nothing but prescribing yet another medicine to treat symptoms. She eventually began to wonder what the odds were that she'd have 10 different diseases with 20 different symptoms as opposed to having one disease that could account for all of them.
So she set out to find out if such a disease existed.
It did.
She then studied the clinical diagnostic criteria for that disease and began looking at her dozens upon dozens of test results and started putting two-and-two together.
She brought it up with our family practitioner who thought she just might be on to something. All of the specialists she saw thought she was an idiot, though.
"It's a one in a million chance you have that!" they all said.
"But the odds of me having these ten separate diseases to account for all my symptoms are one in 25 million," she'd point out. They still dismissed her as crazy.
She finally fought with the insurance company—with the family practitioner standing by her side the whole way—enough to get permission to visit probably the best specialist in the world for what she thought she had. He was in Seattle.
He confirmed she did. She had a relatively simple operation and was cured of all of those 20 symptoms overnight.
The whole experience of not being listened to by her doctors who were just interested only in prescribing medicine to treat symptoms instead of diagnosing root problems led her to go to medical school and become an endocrinologist.
Today she's an endocrinologist at one of the best hospitals in the world, and a medical school professor.
She was tired of scores of doctors doing nothing but prescribing yet another medicine to treat symptoms. She eventually began to wonder what the odds were that she'd have 10 different diseases with 20 different symptoms as opposed to having one disease that could account for all of them.
So she set out to find out if such a disease existed.
It did.
She then studied the clinical diagnostic criteria for that disease and began looking at her dozens upon dozens of test results and started putting two-and-two together.
She brought it up with our family practitioner who thought she just might be on to something. All of the specialists she saw thought she was an idiot, though.
"It's a one in a million chance you have that!" they all said.
"But the odds of me having these ten separate diseases to account for all my symptoms are one in 25 million," she'd point out. They still dismissed her as crazy.
She finally fought with the insurance company—with the family practitioner standing by her side the whole way—enough to get permission to visit probably the best specialist in the world for what she thought she had. He was in Seattle.
He confirmed she did. She had a relatively simple operation and was cured of all of those 20 symptoms overnight.
The whole experience of not being listened to by her doctors who were just interested only in prescribing medicine to treat symptoms instead of diagnosing root problems led her to go to medical school and become an endocrinologist.
Today she's an endocrinologist at one of the best hospitals in the world, and a medical school professor.