Ha. (Or, for the Scrubs fans: "My Lucky Day")

[serinde]

[I have no icon indicating "smug". I really should.]

The anti-allergy meds are having no effect on Steve, other than making him dopey on top of being dizzy. When the D&D group arrived tonight, he shared his tale of woe; whereat Dr. Nick, "Sounds like BPPV to me. Didn't she test you for that?"

S: "No, I mean I asked her about it, but she said it was my allergies."
Dr.N: "Well it could be, but I don't see why she didn't test you for BPPV since you're supposed to for *medical phrase I didn't get* and it takes all of 30 seconds."
YHC: . o O ( I could be a doctor. Except for the parts involving slicing tracheas open. )

After the game, i.e. just now, Nick ran the Dix-Hallpike test on Steve and was delighted to find so classic a case of right-sided BPPV. They are now downstairs shaking the recalcitrant calcium crystals into alignment.

Comments

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

We were actually chatting with Nick about this phenomenon afterwards. His take on it is that a) there are a lot of plain incompetents (though we don't think Steve's doctor is usually one--in fact she's one of Nick's former instructors), but also b) there's a big spectrum of diagnostic understanding, where at one hand you have very learned doctors who are up on all sorts of obscure studies and trained to listen for zebras and are great to have around if what ails you is in fact something weird and unusual, but who suck at garden-variety diagnoses; and at the other you have your family doctor, who's great at solving the day-to-day ailments but if what you have is something strange or obscure will likely miss the catch; and the best you can hope for is someone in between.

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

Nah, the best you can hope for is someone who's good at the garden-variety stuff and can recognize that something weird is going on and refer you to the proper specialist.

(For the most part, my doc is that, but his office staff are obnoxious and useless.)

[lillilah]

I think the reason for my anger is that I am a) difficult to diagnose and b) come off as significantly more of an idiot than I actually am. I have a great deal of trouble getting doctors to listen to my actual words because something about me says to them "she's completely wrong about this and just a big whiner".