If Your Patients Don't Understand What You Tell Them, You Are Not An Adequate Or Effective Healthcare

PSA as we go into spooky season and people start using activated charcoal to make foods look spooky.

what are your thoughts on ibs diagnosis

78% of people reporting to ERs due to IBS have chronic gastritis.

population studies on microscopic colitis are rare, but have found that rates are much much higher on a population level than previously assumed

the symptoms labeled as ibs (diarrhea and constipation with no obvious flags for inflammatory bowel disease) are often treated as an issue of simple dietary intolerances, or as a psychosomatic condition, and people with ibs are told to follow various diets, or to "reduce stress."

these diets tend to be high fiber, which could literally kill someone whose actual issue is gastroparesis, or could severely aggravate microscopic colitis. i know that when i was trying to eat high fiber, my symptoms were completely unmanageable, and switching to a low fiber diet is the only thing that's helped at all. the food intolerance stuff can be really helpful for people who do have rare food intolerances, but for people who actually/also have autoimmune gastritis, it wastes time that could be spent monitoring for gastric atrophy, metaplasias, and precancerous lesions.

the worst part of this is that things like microscopic colitis and h-pylori related chronic gastritis are treatable, either with steroid medication or antibiotics to kill the h-pylori. but if you're dismissed with "dietary changes" or "reduce stress," then you're not getting treated for conditions that can cause really serious tissue damage and increase your cancer risk.

basically ibs is a "fuck you get out of my office" diagnosis

i know hearing people on this website love to pass around those posts with links to free sign language lessons but you know you need to actually put effort into learning about Deaf culture, too, right?

Ah yes, my favorite chronic illness game: is this normal, is this new, or am I dying?

Everyone with gi issues deserves a kiss on the forehead right now

Some people don’t want to hear this but sometimes accessibility is not sustainable or eco-friendly. Disabled people sometimes need straws, or pre-made meals in plastic containers, or single-use items. Just because you can work with your foods in their least processed and packaged form doesn’t mean everyone else can.

Before you pay that not-covered hospital bill:

I want to take a min to spread awareness for the No Surprises Act after noticing a reddit post earlier.

This protection for patients just popped up in the past couple years, and the one major downside is that it's up to the patients to speak up to make use of it, but not everyone knows what it is.

"If you have private health insurance, these new protections ban the most common types of surprise bills. If you’re uninsured or you decide not to use your health insurance for a service, under these protections, you can often get a good faith estimate of the cost of your care up front, before your visit."

Consumer fact sheet

Typically, health insurance companies will help pay for bills from "in-network" providers, AKA their VIP inner circle gang turf. They won't help pay if you get medical care from another gang's henchmen (out of network).

This means that sometimes, a person would go to the hospital, which they knew had been covered by their insurance before, so they expect it's going to be relatively affordable. But they didn't know that multiple medical "gangs" were working in the same hospital. Their anesthesiologist, for example, was from a different gang. That specialist was out of network even though the surgeon and nurses were all in network.

Boom. Big bill for thousands of dollars and their insurance refuses to help pay it.

But now we have this law! The No Surprises Act means that insurance companies need to cover "surprise" expenses (under certain conditions).

If you don't have health insurance, hospitals and clinics need to give you an accurate quote before you get services, then foot the bill if they were too far off the mark.

The Fact Sheet section of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services have some wonderful user-friendly resources for you about health insurance and how this act works.

Keep in mind that Medicare and government-run programs always have weird rules for everything, so you might have different (yet similar) protections through those programs.

If you have a medical bill that wasn't covered by insurance and you think it might count as a surprise bill, please check out your rights and consider fighting it instead of letting it become a stressful expense or debt you can't repay.

Go here to start figuring things out for your situation:

Health insurance companies have way, waaaaay too much power over our lives. We need every drop of protection we can get - but it only counts as much as we can understand and use those protections!

My face is having uncontrollable spasms. Great. It hurts really, really, really bad.

I think part of why I have trouble explaining pain to the doctor is when they ask about the pain scale I always think “Well, if someone threw me down a flight of stairs right now or punched me a few times, it would definitely hurt a lot more” so I end up saying a low number. I was reading an article that said that “10” is the most commonly reported number and that is baffling to me. When I woke up from surgery with an 8" incision in my body and I could hardly even speak, I was in the most horrific pain of my life but I said “6” because I thought “Well, if you hit me in the stomach, it would be worse.”

Useful information