I got really sick around 5 weeks ago. One could call it near death experience. One could also say I am prone to overexaggerating. Thankfully it wasn’t that serious, and I feel close to normal now.
A common side effect of some near-death experiences is that you sometimes you get an epiphany or two. I’m not saying “burning bush” or “stuck in a cave with Gabriel” type revelations, but I basically had all the time in the world to think about some things while feeling miserable. It was during my days in bed with a 103 fever that I had the idea to create this entire blog. The hope was that I could get critique, but also the process of putting my ideas out into public would in itself help me refine them.
Anyway, let’s get to the main point I wanted to write about today. As I was saying, my condition was pretty bad with a very high fever along with headaches, exhaustion, sore throat, lymph node swelling, and all the other things doctors check off during an appointment. I first went to see a doctor after 3 days of serious symptoms. They found absolutely nothing wrong with me. I mean besides the fact that I had every symptom in the book I tested negative for flu and strep. The doctor told me that I had a minor cold.
Two days later when nothing had gotten better, I started getting pretty scared. I went through a list of all possible diseases that ever existed and cross referenced it with my symptoms. If no one I know has Kikuchi Fujimoto Disease, then I had to be the one to get it right? Ironclad logic inspired by my feverish state had me imagining scenarios I won’t even describe.
Eventually, I went back to see the doctor. This time he actually ran some more extensive blood tests. After an hour of waiting he comes in to tell me I had mono.
The first emotion that went through me was relief. It might sound strange, but mono was the perfect illness. It meant I wasn’t dying or going to suffer for an extremely long time, but also it was serious enough to explain why I felt so miserable and meant I wasn’t being an oversensitive baby with a cold as some of my friends had been implying. Hearing the news, interestingly enough, made me feel better on the spot. I think the doctor was equally confused at my reaction as I thanked him and promptly left.
Sure the period to recovery still took a decent amount of time, but I did recover and am now trying to get back the 15 pounds I lost. However, as I began to think back on my entire situation and the state of medicine in general, I began to get more and more angry. I was frustrated with myself, the doctor, and entire medical industry as a whole for a variety of reasons.
First, I was angry with myself for not going to see the doctor sooner and not insisting that I felt a lot worse than the initial diagnosis of having a minor cold. I should have insisted on more tests. But I was much more frustrated at the doctor. Maybe this is hindsight bias but given my condition there should definitely have been a test for mono. I had all the symptoms for mono and they were much more severe than a simple cold that he told me I had.
This isn’t the first time that a professional medical practitioner has let me down. When I was very young, I used to get very sick and every time I had some minor/major illness I would get prescribed antibiotics. After taking antibiotics and getting sick every other week with a different illness, my mother eventually stopped giving me antibiotics when I wasn’t extremely ill. Gradually, my immune system was able to take care of the infections on its own, and I got sick a lot less frequently.
I’m not using my own anecdotal story to claim that all antibiotics are bad and useless, but rather as one piece of a much larger problem of overpresciption of antibiotics. A study shows that in the United States 30% of antibiotics prescriptions are unnecessary. In addition to costing a lot more, they can weaken one’s immune system. This basically leads to the evil cycle of needing more antibiotics for infections that would have cleared up on their own.
This and other examples have led people to seriously distrust medical institutions and has eroded some medical practitioner’s credibility leading to a rise in pseudoscientific medicine. I won’t go deep into vaccines causing autism because I feel like that entire myth has been properly debunked by this point. Another rising pseudoscience is that of homeopathic medicines. The idea behind homeopathy is that if you have some element in diluted quantities to a fluid such as water then the water molecules will have “memory” of the element and lead to curing certain diseases. After having thousands of scientific papers not able to replicate any of the results of homeopathy it has been declared a sham, and yet some of its products sell globally for hundreds of millions of dollars. One of these products is Oscillococcinum— intentionally made difficult to spell so people wouldn’t be tempted to look up what is in it. In it you can find one molecule of duck liver per 10^400 molecules of water. This entire substance is heated up into sugar pellets. Boiron, the company that sells these homeopathic remedies, garners over half a billion dollars of revenue each year.
People often misinterpret their own immune system fighting off the disease as anecdotal evidence that the medicine worked properly. When it doesn’t work, they still claim that they felt better than they would have if they didn’t take the medicine. When doctors make statements that homeopathic medicine is not effective some believe that is because doctors want people to not have access to medication on their own. More sick people means more clients after.
Frankly, this lack of trust of the medical community could also be resultant of lower quality doctors in medical communities. People are asking for second or even third opinions a lot more often. If I hadn’t gone back to the doctor that second time and instead waited out my “cold,” then I could have spread a highly infectious disease to others. Maybe that’s why 95% of people get mono before adulthood.
I’m not sure how to combat the seemingly increasing lack of trust in the medical community. Most of these diseases and diagnoses are all online, so transparency isn’t an issue. I think that in our general educational system we need to focus more on common disease and general health. We have recurring units on sexually transmitted disease, but rarely discuss other common illnesses and diagnosis which leads to a large section of our population being clueless when they start to feel ill as to the proper health protocol and when they need to see a medical specialist. With stronger general educational institutions we can finally bring the coverage of mono in the adult population down to 90%.