Heh.
Sorry, I thought the woman was an ER nurse. I don’t have any loss related to diabetes - I was just a medical lab tech.
As I mentioned, the screening for diabetes is extremely cheap and simple. I don’t doubt what you’re saying, but one thing that annual exams DO routinely find is diabetes. You can’t go visit a friend in the hospital here without getting a urine dipstick done on you; if your state of healthcare in the US is such that doctors aren’t routinely ordering such a cheap and simple screen test, you truly do have serious healthcare system problems.
As for parents not picking up on the symptoms of something as serious and obvious as a kid dying from diabetes, I just don’t know about that. If it makes you sick enough to die, I’ve gotta think it makes you sick enough to exhibit the common symptoms of diabetes (extreme thirst, extreme urination, extreme hunger, sudden weight loss, smelling of nail polish remover (the ketones from starvation). I guess if people are saying these things aren’t noticeable in a kid until the kid is dead, I’ll have to believe it.
It is the parents fault no matter how you look at it. If faith would cure the child ,obviously they didn’t have enough faith, or had the wrong kind. Then they are to blame. Their faith should be questioned. This is a rejection ,by god, of their faith or lack of it.
I’m sorry, for some reason I read your first sentence as “My daughter died from Type 1 insulin dependent diabetes…” which, of course, is not what it says.
I quite agree. I have no idea *why *it isn’t routinely done, but it isn’t, and I think that does say quite a bit about the state of our healthcare system. We’d rather not do a cheap test on everyone and spend the money on extraordinary care on a few. I don’t understand it, myself.
When my friend’s daughter was diagnosed, I asked about having my son (exact same age) screened, when we were next in for a well-kid visit. Nope, they don’t screen routinely. IIRC, the logic was that they could get a perfectly normal reading, and have it develop a month later, and the kid’ll look sick at the time.
In fact my kids have only been urine-tested once apiece. Once when Dweezil was about 3, in the context of testing for metabolic/genetic issues related to autism, and once when Moon Unit was 4ish. Odd that they don’t do it more routinely, actually.
Same here. I can only recall being in a doctors office twice when I was a minor. Once was a sort of clinic thing for a general checkup when I was 13ish and once at 15 when I had bronchitis.
My insurance only pays for my kids to do a well child visit every other year. No routine screening for diabetes - no urine testing, no blood draw. Mine are both overdue for a visit to the peditrician. My daughter was in for a strep swab or something in the past year - I don’t think my son has been in over two years because he is overdue.
(I’ll call and make an appointment for them both today).
Now, I go to an Internist, I’ve never had so much blood drawn in my life as when I switched from having my primary care doctor be my OB/GYN to an Internist. And the GP I went to prior to the OB/GYN never did that much lab work either.
Wow - this has been an eye-opening thread. From the perspective of someone who has urinalysis done every time they stick their nose in a doctor’s office and from the other side of the lab coat, doing routing urinalysis on just about every patient who has tests ordered, this is really surprising me. I can recall back in my lab tech days that we occasionally would get a positive for glucose in the urine on a routine screen; it was little upsetting because you knew that that one simple little test was going to change someone’s life (although positive, too, because you knew you were catching a potentially fatal condition).
I don’t remember my kids getting them either, and they got checkups once a year. On the other hand, it hardly matters in this case. If the girl was sick enough to be prayed over, she was sick enough to visit the doctor (or the ER if they were poor) and I would guess that any nearly competent doctor would order the tests to find what was wrong.
Again, you don’t know that. Some people pray while waiting for the bus. Many people pray for their favorite sports teams to win. Some people say, “I’ll pray for you!” when what they mean is “good luck!” The occasion of prayer says nothing about how serious the symptoms appeared.
Let me be clear: I don’t know that, either. Yes, absolutely, the girl may have been unconscious and unresponsive for more than 15 hours. (Less than that just looks like “sleep” to most of us.) She might have smelled like nail polish remover and have been peeing kool-aid (although I don’t make a habit of smelling my kids’ urine, so I don’t know how I’d catch that one). She might have been losing weight at an alarming rate for the last 6 months. Could be. Or could not.
But this whole prayer thing is just a huge red herring, and it’s trashy sensationalist journalism at it’s worst - especially since the family themselves maintain that they’re not terribly religious. I could see it being relevant if the parents ever claimed that they thought prayer was better than medicine. Or if they were known members of a religious group like the Christian Scientists who eschew medical care. But they’re not, as far as that reporter knows. So whatever they chose, whatever symptoms they may have missed or may have ignored, it seems, with the information we have now, that their religion had nothing to do with it. How do I know that? Because they said so, and because it’s entirely plausible to me, having been there myself, that it went down that way. Is it possible the investigation into this will turn up something more damning? Sure. And at that point, I’ll pick up a pitchfork with the rest of you. But right now it feels just too much like anti-religious hatemongering.
There are also, now that I look back to the article to check my assertions, two conflicting reports:
and later:
So which was it? Did the family call 911? Did they not respond? Was Dale perhaps on the phone with a relative in California when his daughter stopped breathing and asked them to call Wisconsin’s 911 while he did CPR? I have no idea, because the writing in this article sucks.
Urinalysis has been ordered with every set of labs my husband and I have had. My mother (a nurse) considers them part of standard blood work. They usually do a fasting glucose, as well, even though I have no family history of diabetes and am not at any more risk then your average 22 year old.
Wait, you’ve had a fasting glucose test? Like, regularly? I’ve only had that once, when I was pregnant, where it is standard. (My second pregnancy ended one week before my test was scheduled; thank goodness I didn’t have to drink that nasty stuff again!)
I’m glad you’ve got a very thorough doc, or your mom knew just the right pressure to apply to get you a more thorough work up than most. Don’t give him up!
Bullshit. Faith is the hope of something becoming a reality (or part of it); NOT a denial of it…ya knucklehead. :rolleyes:
Let’s see :
All this “they are not crazy, religious people and they have nothing against doctors” stuff sounds like after the fact excuse making.
And they home-schooled, which by itself means there’s a pretty good likelyhood they are religious extremists.
BS back at you. Faith is the assertion without evidence that what you believe is true, and/or the denial of any facts that contradict what you believe. Hope that what you want to believe is true is just that, hope; not faith.
Whynot, I think you’re getting a fasting glucose test confused with a glucose tolerance test (these are the terms that my mother uses, if they are wrong, please correct me). A fasting glucose test is when you get blood drawn in the morning, not having eaten. A glucose tolerance test is when they give you sugar syrup and test your blood multiple times over the course of many minutes. If the first kind of test has wonky results, they order the second.
Why don’t the parents have the doctor “pray” over the daughter?
An interesting definition. By that criterion, a theist does NOT have faith in the existence of God (since they hold that God already exists), but an atheist could, if they hoped that God was going to come into existence. In fact, being an atheist who’s just read and been impressed by Charles Stross’s “Singularity Sky”, I could now claim to ‘have faith in God’. You’ve converted me!
Without getting into a battle of the dictionaries, I think your concept of faith is at variance with most generally accepted definitions of the word. What would it mean for a religious person to ‘lose their faith’? In what sense is Her Maj QE2 the ‘Defender of the Faith’?
Bit too quick calling someone a knucklehead there.
The feeling is mutual. I can only recall having urine tests three times in my life–one was at a very young age (young enough that I barely remember), and the other two were alongside blood tests, so not exactly a routine procedure. I’ve also had blood drawn at one of the same clinics without having to piss in a cup, so I can’t even say that it’s always done as part of a blood draw.
I’ll let the lab techs rattle off the colors but I’ll bet you dollars to donuts if you’ve had more than a couple tubes of blood drawn for lab work, especially if you’re over 30ish/overweight at all. One of those is going to involve blood sugar levels/A1C, etc.