Patients are frequently told ultrasounds will detect endometriosis, but this is often false. The guest's normal ultrasound was followed by a laparoscopy revealing stage 4 disease, highlighting a critical diagnostic gap that forces patients to pay for definitive procedures.
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Contrary to trends in wellness, a full-body MRI doesn't catch cancer early. A mass visible on an MRI already contains billions of cells and may have spread. Furthermore, it often leads to a rabbit hole of invasive tests for benign abnormalities, causing unnecessary harm.
Paying for a private laparoscopy that confirms severe endometriosis does not guarantee a smoother journey in the public system. The guest struggled to get her public (NHS) team to acknowledge the results due to a lack of communication and data sharing between sectors.
The guest suggests her condition significantly worsened during the pandemic due to high stress and a potential hormone imbalance (estrogen dominance). She found that an anti-inflammatory diet significantly helped manage the pain, linking lifestyle factors to symptom severity.
The speaker regrets not using AI to guide a physical exam of his son. A key diagnostic breakthrough occurred when a doctor found a specific point of pain on his son's abdomen. This suggests a powerful, untapped use case for AI in helping patients or caregivers identify crucial physical symptoms that might otherwise be missed.
The guest, a senior physiotherapist, faced extreme dismissal from doctors. One questioned her confirmed Stage 4 diagnosis, while another accused her of self-diagnosing due to her profession, refusing a gynecology referral and insisting on more physiotherapy.
Despite a confirmed diagnosis and her expertise as a physiotherapist, the guest was forced to undergo nine months of painful Zolidex injections and unnecessary physiotherapy consultations before she could get the hysterectomy she was fighting for.
The guest described hiding her pain so much that it resulted in a constant grimace or 'resting bitch face'. After her hysterectomy, multiple people commented on the visible change in her face, demonstrating how profoundly untreated chronic pain alters physical appearance.
Even for common conditions like pneumonia, current diagnostic methods like sputum and blood cultures fail to identify a bacterial cause in 60% of cases. This diagnostic gap leads to clinical guesswork, resulting in dangerous under-treatment. In one study, one in eight patients with a bacterial infection was sent home from the ER without antibiotics.
The guest, a senior physiotherapist, was repeatedly told her pain was spinal. Her endometriosis was wrapping around her sciatic and femoral nerves, causing symptoms that even orthopedic specialists misidentified, delaying her hysterectomy by two years.
A critical limitation of PSMA PET is its inability to detect tumors that do not express the PSMA protein. In these cases, a patient may show extensive disease on a conventional bone scan that is entirely invisible on a PSMA PET scan, highlighting the risk of relying on a single imaging modality.
