Thu, Apr-12-18, 11:27
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Senior Member
Posts: 14,673
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Plan: EpiPaleo/Primal/LowOx
Stats: 220/130/150
BF:
Progress: 129%
Location: USA
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Barbara Ehrenreich: Why I’m Giving Up on Preventative Care
Not a low carb story, but a cry against the medical establishment we all might enjoy:
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Giving up on preventative care
So I grudgingly conceded that undergoing the test, which is noninvasive and covered by my insurance, might be preferable to immobility and institutionalization. The result was a diagnosis of “osteopenia,” or thinning of the bones, a condition that might have been alarming if I hadn’t found out that it is shared by nearly all women over the age of 35. Osteopenia is, in other words, not a disease but a normal feature of aging. A little further research, all into readily available sources, revealed that routine bone scanning had been heavily promoted and even subsidized by the drug’s manufacturer. Worse, the favored medication at the time of my diagnosis has turned out to cause some of the very problems it was supposed to prevent—bone degeneration and fractures. A cynic might conclude that preventive medicine exists to transform people into raw material for a profit-hungry medical-industrial complex.
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My bold. I join her in her cynicism.
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It turned out, after I’d been through a sonogram and fought panic in a coffin-like MRI tube, that the “bad mammogram” was a false positive resulting from the highly sensitive new digital forms of imaging. That was my last mammogram. Lest this seem like a reckless decision, I was supported in it by a high-end big-city oncologist, who viewed all my medical images and said that there would be no need to see me again, which I interpreted as ever again.
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Ms. Ehrenreich (most famously the author of Nickled and Dimed, her investigative journalism of trying to survive on minimum wage) is a breast cancer survivor, and was fairly caustic about some of the expectations she encountered along the way.
It's science like this that makes me think our ability to test for things has far outpaced our ability to understand for things we get from it.
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Many physicians justify tests of dubious value by the “peace of mind” they supposedly confer— except of course on those who receive false positive results. Thyroid cancer is particularly vulnerable to over-diagnosis. With the introduction of more high-powered imaging techniques, doctors were able to detect many more tiny lumps in people’s necks and surgically remove them, whether surgery was warranted or not. An estimated 70 to 80 percent of thyroid cancer surgeries performed on US, French, and Italian women in the first decade of the 21st century are now judged to have been unnecessary. In South Korea, where doctors were especially conscientious about thyroid screening, the number rose to 90 percent (Men were also over-diagnosed, but in far lower numbers.) Patients pay a price for these surgeries, including a lifelong dependence on thyroid hormones, and since these are not always fully effective, the patient may be left chronically “depressed and sluggish.”
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Essentially, this is what precipitated the health crisis I am still struggling out of. Dr. Idiot didn't listen to me when I told him what my supplemental hormones did for me, so when catastrophe happened with the hormone withdrawal he moved to solve the immediate problem... and stunned my body into a severe lack of hormones of many kinds. Then I wasn't listened to when I complained. Still treating myself because I also had the flipside: I was tested for almost anything my doctor could think of except hormones. Because that's an endocrinologist thing... and don't get me started with them. 
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Physician and blogger John M. Mandrola advises straightforwardly:
Rather than being fearful of not detecting disease, both patients and doctors should fear healthcare. The best way to avoid medical errors is to avoid medical care. The default should be: I am well. The way to stay that way is to keep making good choices—not to have my doctor look for problems.
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