Apparently the OP doesn’t feel he got a complete diagnosis unless he also got an etiology, which he didn’t. He didn’t get it from his co-worker either, though, unless “lack of GNC fish oil” is an etiology.
And now I know that, which is more important to me than which specific viral syndrome I do have.
Does anyone else not get how AnaMen can’t see the importance of knowing whether what you have needs a specific treatment or not? It’s not just peace of mind-- it’s that if you had needed treatment you would be getting it, whereas, if you hadn’t gone to the doctor, you would not, and therefore be significantly worse off.
“Why don’t I just skip my monthly breast exams, because if I don’t find anything, I might as well not have done the exam anyway?” <– this makes no freaking sense!
If you find out you do not have Disease X, you actually do NOT need treatment for Disease X, so your physical health will not suffer from not knowing.
I have stated several times that I am NOT advocating skipping medical tests.
Let me repeat: I like medical tests. They are good. I want them. I talk doctors into extra tests – that’s how much I love them. I talk other people’s doctors into doing extra medical tests.
If someone asked me if I think they should have a mammogram, I’d suggest two. Even if that person was a man! I probably wouldn’t have one myself, but I would lie, just so as not to set a poor example.
I fear my point is simply too confusing to articulate in a way that makes sense to anyone. Just forget it.
To your peace of mind, maaaaybe, but not to your physical health.
And since most such tests have rather rare false positives, but less-rare false negatives, your peace of mind may be misplaced.
What additional information would you get to better address your physical health from knowing which virus caused your sore throat?
None.
What information did you get from the biopsy, etc., to better address your physical health?
Also none.
Imagine:
You have some random cold virus. You go to the doctor. The doctor decides to do some tests for random shit you’ve never heard of. The results come back negative.
You say “It’s a good thing I went to the doctor. Otherwise, ____________________.”
What goes in the blank?
Alternately, you say “Well, it turns out I needn’t have gone to the doctor, but I had no way of knowing that in advance, so I made the best choice I could at the time.”
Eh, all that extra medical care has a cost. It isn’t a situation where all that happens is you either get it fixed or nothing bad happens. Lots of diseases can be picked up in hospitals, Rx interactions from extra drugs, surgical accidents, cancer from too many CT scans, etc. 3-5% of future cancers could be due to things like CT scans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/31/opinion/we-are-giving-ourselves-cancer.html?_r=0
Plus you have the fact that you may not always need treatment, or the treatment is worse than the disease. If you have to treat X number of people to save Y lives, but in the process you cause Z numbers of deaths and illnesses you could be in either group Y or Z. This is an issue with breast cancer, on paper ‘give everyone surgery and chemo’ sounds great but when you factor in how many people would survive anyway and how many people end up sicker due to surgery and chemo, it may not be as cut and dried.
When someone is making six figures, I don’t want to hear the word TYLENOL, understand what I am trying to explain to you?
What if she had said “GNC fish oil” instead." Would you be happier? I don’t understand why you think Tylenol is bad advice, or why her salary makes a difference. Did you want a narcotics prescription? then you should have asked for one. You should said “I have been taking Tylenol for the last two weeks, and it isn’t helping.” She might have given you tramadol, or she might have given you Percoset. But if you hadn’t tried Tylenol yet, you should have. Just because she has the power of prescription doesn’t mean that prescription medication is always appropriate.
Plus, she also said “physical therapy.”
Tylenol has never relieved any pain for any person I know my entire life so I was completely turned off
Works great for me. I can’t imagine having a period without Tylenol. I’d wrestle an alligator for the last one when I’m menstruating.
Also, it works great for tooth pain. After I get a filling, I usually taken it for a couple of days. And tooth pain is some kind of pain. It also works great for body aches when I have a sinus infection or a bad cold. I think it’s a great drug, because aspirin is what does nothing for me. I even took it for several days after my c-section. I had narcotics in the hospital, but after I was discharged, I took Tylenol. The doctor suggested that ibuprofen would help with the swelling, so I should take that, but it didn’t help much with pain, so I took Tylenol as well.
You understand that doctors aren’t mind-readers, right? If you communicate that Tylenol hasn’t helped, she can move to the next option. But if you aren’t going to communicate, nor even try the prescribed treatment… again, why bother? Did you pay the co-pay just so that you’d have some subject for a recreational outrage thread on the SDMB?
Your experiences are atypical. Tylenol works for millions of people every day.
Yeah. I never buy aspirin, because it doesn’t work for me. Acetaminophen, on the other hand, practically miracle drug.
This may come as a bit of a surprise to you, 7e42, especially considering your “how come the TVs show commercials I personally don’t like?” thread, but your individual experiences and opinions are NOT universal.
Okay, yes… I was just trying to clarify that I am not anti-test as I was accused. I’d rather have a test than the uninformed opinion of an inadequate doctor. I do avoid invasive testing in general, but I’m a big fan of blood work. I’d never go to the doctor for a sore throat, flu, cold, etc. and I’ll never do another test where I have to swallow any kind of poisonous contrast. If someone has symptoms of a testable treatable serious illness, they should go for the test if they would choose to treat the illness. The testing industry has gotten kind of out of hand, but people are generally not capable of figuring out which tests make sense for them.
I have a 7-year-old, and strep can be very serious in a child, so we always go to the doctor for sore throats. One time, I had a sore throat, and tested positive for strep, so we had our son tested, and he came up positive even though he was completely asymptomatic. The doctor sent his sample for the longer, more accurate culture just to be sure. If I had not gotten my sore throat checked out, our son could have progressed to a pediatric neurological problem that strep causes, or to a heart problem it also causes.
Another time we all had strep, DH got it first, and didn’t bother to get it checked, and was sick for a week before the boychik got sick. Then DH went. The boychik had amoxicillin, and because I’m allergic to the PCN family, I got a Z-Pac. DH got penicillin. Boychik and I got better, DH got walking pneumonia, and missed two weeks of work. We had to use savings to pay bills. Turned out his strep was PCN resistant. He took three days of tetracycline, at the same time he took a Z-Pac, and finally got better, but he was also on a lot of palliative meds for the pneumonia, and still has to get a chest x-ray every year. If he’d gone when he first felt sick, we would have known a lot sooner that what he had was PCN resistant, and he could have gotten started on something else before he progressed to pneumonia.
Maybe you should ask your doctor about this:
I wonder if it’s any different from the in-office tests, which have few false positives, some false negatives.
Or ask yourself these two questions:
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2013/11/04/two-questions-may-rule-out-strep-throat
From the article: "‘Those questions would be: Do you have a cough, and have you had a fever in the last 24 hours?’ said study author Dr. Andrew Fine, a pediatric emergency medicine specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital. High fevers are a hallmark of strep infections, while coughs are not.
In a new study of more than 70,000 patients with sore throats, those two questions and an accounting of how common strep infections were within a local area ruled out cases of strep throat nearly as well as lab tests did."
I’ve known several people who are made ill by opiates who were given Tylenol as their only pain reliever after major surgeries. They all said it worked well.