Mirror newspaper article on hyperparathyroidism

'NHS doctors brushed off our condition as menopause – what we suffer from is far worse'

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/healt...30n-X3aLLqPtckf3u4_aem_vbdi1bwgIUS3D0L0ulVZuQ

 

Reading this emphasises to me the failure of the GP system in an age when medicine is complicated and requires specialised expertise and a motivation to be thorough..

When my niece changed from being an ordinary GP to a hospital frontline generalist (a sort of GP in A/E) she commented that hospital doctors seemed 'risk averse'. What she meant was they tended to make sure they weren't missing something unusual. GPs are taught to ignore the possibility of anything unusual and keep people happy. My niece said that at first this thoroughness seemed strange and then she came to understand the reason for it.

Even as a hospital doctor I was taught to go for the common things and not waste too much resources on other possibilities. We live in an age in which a high proportion of medical problems are not particularly common things. The common things got dealt with. So the GP mentality needs to go.

Unfortunately, the new government sees things the other way around and wants to pour all the money into GP.

 

Sorry I seem to be struggling cognitively today, the draft for this thread disappeared several times and then posted before I was finished. Also I manage to delete the contents of this second post several times:

'NHS doctors brushed off our condition as menopause – what we suffer from is far worse'

Today the UK Mirror newspaper ran a feature on two woman’s struggle over many years to get a diagnosis of hyperparathyroidism:

[added - sorry moderators if there are incomplete drafts lurking somewhere, please feel free to delete.]

 

And it seems in Denmark the GP mentality is also actively being promoted by Dr Fink and co (on another thread).

Since 2008, all trainee General Practitioners (GPs) in Western Denmark have received basic training in diagnosing FSD and communicating/negotiating the diagnosis with FSD patients using The Extended Reattribution and Management (TERM) model [16, 19]. However, many GPs feel inadequate in managing the more complicated cases, especially at the early stage where the diagnosis is still uncertain and physical differential diagnoses have not been excluded.

 

It must be such joy to have a bin labelled - "FSD" -- perhaps we could suggest sub-titles "all(?) of the difficult cases go here" --- "challenge is getting some of the ------- to accept the label"---

 

I feel that GPs sometimes don't listen to the degree of severity of a patient's problems.

E.g. In this story, the GP seems to have heard "aches and pains and fatigue" vs. the patient reporting "pain all over" and severe exhaustion to the point she couldn't keep up with her 87-year-old mother.

 

I wonder whether it's possible to calculate the money that could be saved by listening carefully early on. Another patient in the story says that she had symptoms for 25 years.

Not that money is the main concern, but it always helps to convince the beancounters that a different approach works better.