AIMHB, last January, I got misdiagnosed with emphysema by a radiologist. It was very exciting! I spent something like 5 days getting an appointment with my general practitioner to confirm via lung spirometry that my lungs were, in fact, fine. I'm sure the radiologist never found out about the misdiagnosis.
I can, however, attest to the fact that this kind of diagnosis is a great motivator to get in shape, cardio-wise.
I still have a chip on my shoulder about the massive five hour in depth psych workup when Pokey was six or so that concluded he suffered from depression and oppositional defiant disorder and both were to be grim diagnoses with little to be done, and it ended up being highly responsive to ADHD meds.
Granted, I think he's an atypical ADHD presentation. (I don't even know if it makes sense to say he IS adhd, aside from medical bills, as opposed to just saying he responds really well to adhd meds.) But that's why it would be useful for that doc to know he got it wrong!! Maybe other kids respond well to these meds!
I'm pretty sure that me plus google for an hour is better at diagnosing than a PCP with 5 minutes and no internet. The most notable example is when I was pretty sure I had sesamoiditis (caused by those 200 stairs in Morningside Park), and the PCP said it was arthritis and then sent me to a specialist who said it was sesamoiditis.
Misdiagnosis isn't a uniquely American thing. Mrs Y presented with abdominal pain and a few other nasties, and was told she had advanced liver cancer. A second opinion, prompted by ten minutes googling, changed that to a gall stone, which was removed inside a week. All better now.
4: I had a really good PCP who left the hospital. Then I had a meh doctor, then one who was well regarded. But then I found out that the old one was coming to a health center I know, and I made an appt. I saw her and it was. Such a relief to watch her approach the fairly simple ear issue, but she managed it better than anyone else I'd seen in the past few months, and she explained her thinking.
And then she urgently needed to look after family after only a couple months on the job, and she left. I have an appt next March with another doc or I could go back to the one I left, but I don't expect to feel safe/ trusting with a PCP.
My son didn't speak until after he was 18 months old. I found some good, solid research online regarding autism and tests you could perform at home. My recollection is that, at 18 months, if he couldn't perform three out of seven tasks, he was probably autistic. He failed to do five of them.
The specialist we took him to indicated that I was being ridiculous. The specialist was right.
There's a bug on your head right now.
After my first kid was born I had some complications, and I was furious at my doctor for the way I was treated during the birth/post birth and so switched to a new doctor (hands down the best doctor I have ever had). New doc offered to write old doc a letter out of courtesy, explaining what was missed, politely, to allow for precisely this kind of feedback loop. Old doc sent me a bill for the time it took to read the letter.
(This did nothing to improve my opinion of him.)
Context for those interested: non-US (Switzerland), in the last decade.
After my first kid was born I had some complications, and I was furious at my doctor for the way I was treated during the birth/post birth and so switched to a new doctor (hands down the best doctor I have ever had). New doc offered to write old doc a letter out of courtesy, explaining what was missed, politely, to allow for precisely this kind of feedback loop. Old doc sent me a bill for the time it took to read the letter.
(This did nothing to improve my opinion of him.)
Context for those interested: non-US (Switzerland), in the last decade.
8: In the US they couldn't bill for that. Wow.
What did he claim his reading rate was? I'd totally argue with a doctor who billed for reading that they're clearly low intelligence based on how long they say it took.
I guess I shouldn't assume he since you didn't specify old doc. "I can't operate on this child, he's my son!"
8 is totally crazy. What a dick.
Also, parodie, I meant to express sympathy in the other thread over your ongoing lockdown status and vaccination delays. I keep talking about the reopening process, but having it be available to so many others must feel like the worst senioritis/captivity past the expiration date.
I can't operate on this child; he's inside a dog, wearing my pajamas!
11: Old doc (yes, he) billed for "study of dossier without patient present" and I think it was 5 minutes or so, it wasn't a big bill - but it seemed like the pettiest, most ridiculous move. I even asked new doc if this was normal, and she was surprised by the move. Technically allowed by the system, but she would not bill for the same thing.
13: thanks. It is really hard to be patient. Senioritis is the perfect description.
At the airport the other day, two parents were repeatedly reminding their little son not to lick the window or support pole on the people mover. So it's not like were completely free here.
15: My god, that's so amazingly shitty. If anything, he should be paying for the continuing professional education.
re:15.last, got called last night for a leftover dose and got my first vaccine! I assume because I complained on here about having to wait so long. Very lucky, very happy.
This blog post by statistician Andrew Gelman makes me very disinclined to give the new Kahneman book any consideration at all. There's not much reason to think they know much *about* variance.
Speaking of misdiagnoses and comment 2, we're currently in a super stressful situation regarding daycare (although this is kind of a 1st-world-generous-welfare-state-problem). Long long rant to follow that's just me blowing off steam.
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The Infanta has been in a full-time (-ish, 8-15:30) private daycare (PKG), right across the street from us, since she was about 7 months old; she's now 25 months old. She seems to like the daycare, the teachers seem nice, but one big downside is there's no attached outdoor space -- there's a giant park a few blocks away to the south, but they don't go every day because it's non-trivial to organize excursions of 1-3 year olds. We applied for city kindergartens with this in mind, and got a place in one (CKG1) about 600m away to the north, which has a gigantic dedicated playground area. In addition, the city kindergartens are: 1- cheaper (~€70 vs €140/month; yes I know we are insanely lucky in that respect); 2- have longer hours if we need them, and fewer holidays; 3- probably have better trained personnel, who are more likely to be native German speakers; 4- have more access to language teachers and other specialists.
This last bit turns out to be a two-edged sword. Background: because the Infanta was born a month early, we had the opportunity to enroll her in this development monitoring program, where she goes to a development center every once in awhile. At the recent 2 year observation, they said she had average or above-average cognitive and physical development, but that she seemed somewhat shy, and they would want to look at her again in 6 months. (Note: she is indeed relatively antisocial; she's also lived 3/4 of her life in a socially distanced pandemic.) Her daycare teacher, incidentally, thinks she's doing great, and is particularly impressed at her language development.
So anyway, at the CKG1 enrollment appointment, everything was going fine (aside from the very curt way the deputy director refused to have the meeting in English, but she was old enough that maybe she really couldn't), until they mentioned getting permission for various specialists to examine tI while she was at the kindergarten. I mentioned that she had already been seen by the development center, and tried to explain that this was a program to monitor all premature babies, and that she had been judged to be developing normally. But the tone immediately changed, and the director said that now tI would need to be evaluated by the city psychologist to make sure she was put in the right group. Because the daycare has a special-needs group and a mixed special-needs-and-non-special-needs group, we think this means classifying tI as a special-needs student. While we obviously want her to get all the support she needs, it seems very insane that a 2-year old would have to pass a test with a psychologist to avoid being classified as a special needs child simply because they are in a premature baby monitoring program -- especially given the high risks of misdiagnosis for children of non-German speakers (this becomes a very serious issue after age 5, where they can be shunted into 'preschool' if judged unready, or, thanks to the previous far-right gov't, held for years in segregated 'German support classes' on the bases of secret unvalidated tests). They didn't explain things at all, and my German is still not good enough for me to play the role of the assertive, engaged, professional class parent; we felt powerless and humiliated by the whole experience.
We tried to get the development center to straighten this out for us, but they didn't seem to see this as a problem at all ("well, she did seem shy, what's the problem with her being seen by somebody? we can't do anything, it's just how the KG system works") -- which now has us feeling a lot of hostility towards the place, and disinclined to go back; it seems like they are structurally set up to over-diagnose and find problems, with no thought to the dangers of false positives.
A further wrinkle is that our new apartment is actually across the big park, so this city kindergarten would now be 2km away. There's another city kindergarten, the most sought-after in the city (CKG2), right in the middle of the park -- we'll apply for that next year, and hopefully get in, because distance is the main criteria and we are incredibly close, but that would be fall 2022.
As a result of all this, we're now thinking we'll just keep her in her current kindergarten: we now simply don't feel good about CKG1; we don't want her to have to switch twice in two years, especially now that she is finally starting to kind of make friends; and her current one would be a shorter and nicer commute (15m walk, 10m of which through the gorgeous park).
Provided we actually get the spot at CKG2, there's no reason to be unhappy with the final outcome. And yet, and YET -- I'm so angry and frustrated about the whole experience. I know from some research (I'm currently writing a paper about kindergarten availability in our city, incidentally) that there is a serious issue with migrant-background parents being disadvantaged when it comes to getting "good" daycare/kindergarten places, both structurally (unless both parents have full-time "regular" jobs, the kind that guarantees you a place back after maternity leave, you are unlikely to get a city KG spot until the kid is much older; Turkish-background women in particular are MUCH less likely to have those jobs) and informally (via being made to feel unwelcome). And I feel like we're just giving up and letting that happen to us instead of fighting, and that this kind of "we don't want to be there anyway!" reaction helps the status quo perpetuate itself. I also feel that I've failed a crucial *personal* test, because it was supposed to be my responsibility to get my German good enough to deal with this stuff, and generally be the interface between our household and KaKania -- I've always assured Iberian Fury that no matter how unjust and xenophobic KaKania is, we personally, and tI, will be fine, because we are the "good" foreigners, and our professional & professorial class position will more than compensate for the Ausländerfeindlichkeit. But here was our first big test of that proposition, and I failed it miserably.
Anyway. Iberian Fury is even more angry about this than I am, but her reaction is much more "fuck them, how dare they, they don't deserve tI's presence!", and less "we can't let them get away with this!". We're at least going to have her secretary call CKG1 on behalf of Frau Dr Professorin Iberian Fury, nominally to determine if there was some misunderstanding and clarify exactly what this psychologist examination would be, why it was called for, what consequences there would be, etc.; but really to make the director realize just who they are dealing with. This motive makes me kind of ashamed, but this way I can imagine that just perhaps, it will encourage the director to rethink their procedures and what happened. (Yes, I know it won't, but this is about giving me a face-saving fantasy.)
Blargh! Oh, also, in the last weeks we've been trying to figure out how to make our new apartment livable, realizing we might not have a kitchen for some time after we move in, and IF has had to deal with a super insanely stressful science situation involving complicated data access rights and etiquette. Maybe this should have gone in the checking in thread.
I don't think much of Sunstein (so I'm prepared to think he's an idiot), but that Gelman post reads like what they used to call a "Fisking", where you nitpick something in high dungeon. There's a completely defensible version of the correlation statement, and if you simplified that statement a bit too much for the public, you would end up with that quote that led to the over-the-top histrionics.
Fisking. Now, that's a word I haven't heard in a long time....