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I've just read the article linked in post #1. I'm afraid quite a lot of it made my skin crawl.

Excruciatingly painful because, being "medically unexplained", doctors refuse to prescribe pain relief that actually helps. After all, people with MUS are just drug seekers, attention-seekers, and malingerers. Aren't they? I've actually read that patients who tell doctors that paracetamol...

@rvallee Your graphic from Eric Topol's tweet has the bottom chopped off and I think the missing info is necessary to understand what is being shown, so I've posted it again in the hope it can be seen in its entirety. But even then I'm not certain I understand what is being shown. Is column 1...

My bold When results of blood tests are judged to be normal, I always assume this just means that the results land somewhere in the reference interval for the test. If someone has a test done with a result of X and the reference interval is B to C, then doctors declare X to be normal if it...

@JemPD What does "objectively well" actually mean, I wonder? I'm guessing it means that unless the problem a patient has is visible they are deemed to be well, and therefore are assumed to be malingering if they turn up at A&E. But that attitude has been standard practice for years. It...

My bold... I've posted this before, so this isn't the first time I've made this point. It is an n=1 anecdote. This idea that "there is no identifiable organic pathology" suggests that doctors all do their utmost to look for all possibilities and find nothing. But what they really mean is...

But surely that is the ideal? Give patients drugs they can take when necessary to prevent Covid getting serious and requiring hospital/ICU stays?

That article is shocking in the attitude displayed by the author to patients, but sadly not remotely surprising. What does surprise me though is that apparently there is a part of the NHS I've never come across which will give people extensive investigations and long inpatient stays while the...

Why do you think the headline is irresponsible?

I think that "lessons will be learned" is just a hackneyed cliché that never seems to actually change anything, whether it is in medicine, law, government or big business. As far as I am concerned, each time I hear it I know that nothing will really change to improve the situation under...

I've just read the following anecdote on another forum, written by a woman, naturally :

Okay, I didn't get a full blood count either. Edit : Actually, the situation I was in was far more complicated than that sentence implies, but I don't want to go through it all on the forum.

What is this going to do to the death rate in women, I wonder, where death is caused by an entirely treatable condition?

I noticed that my hand-grip strength diminished dramatically and quickly after having a hysterectomy, and I've read similar comments from other women in the same circumstances. Not only that, if I try and maintain my strongest grip (which isn't very strong at all any more) on something, e.g...

My bolding in the quotes below. Non-cardiac chest pain (in my experience) is treated as a mental condition in the UK once heart attack has been ruled out. I am guessing that if someone was diagnosed with non-cardiac chest pain and had tachycardia too, the tachycardia would probably be assumed...

One thing I hated for years is that I would wash clothes, they would come out smelling fresh, then when I wore them my body heat would warm up the clothes, and a stale sweat smell would come off. There have been times throughout my life when I have thrown away clothes that were in good condition...

The other good thing about George Monbiot being involved is that MS probably won't block him, and MS will have to read what Monbiot says.

[I'm assuming a prank pill is another name for a placebo.] This kind of comment always startles me. If someone had pancreatitis (for example), the condition would be invisible, excruciatingly painful, and potentially fatal if left undiagnosed and untreated. I've never had pancreatitis, but I...

I often wonder what Sharpe would say to someone who accidentally came his way with appendicitis or hepatitis or a cracked femur. I just assume he would claim they were attention-seeking and mentally ill, because I simply can't imagine him ever accepting that someone could have a physical illness...

So, Sharpe gets his right of reply but readers have no right to comment? Monbiot's article had comments enabled, Sharpe's article should have the same treatment.