Trial By Error: Some Thoughts on MUS and Bermingham; My Letter to Professor Payne

[NelliePledge]

If MUS is a psychological diagnosis, rather than medical, than the patient population experiencing the worst delays completely disappears.

If you stop counting failures, you can claim a lot of success. So MUS patients are not experiencing serious illness, instead they are experiencing serious distress.

Even Orwell would be horrified.

Except some of them pop up later because they should have been diagnosed with MS or Parkinson’s or cancer. By which time they are likely to be more costly to treat as they have gone untreated for years and their illness has become worse than it was when they were being MUSd.

 

[rvallee]

Except some of them pop up later because they should have been diagnosed with MS or Parkinson’s or cancer. By which time they are likely to be more costly to treat as they have gone untreated for years and their illness has become worse than it was when they were being MUSd.

Of course. But I don't think this factors in their calculations. This is either someone else's problem or a sacrifice they are willing to make.

Anyway the economic losses massively outweigh the meagre benefits but that's a separate account so it doesn't factor in those decisions either. Medicine is sadly not much better at calculating externalities than business is.

Just for comparison's sake, the 17-24M estimated means between the populations of Poland and Australia. Even evenly distributed and adjusted for variations in economic activity, it's hard to come up with much less than $300-500B per year in economic productivity that is simply pissed away. And that's just us. When you add all the other blacklisted disease, it's likely to represent a net loss of 1-2% of the entire world's GDP.

Economics doesn't always bring great understanding but people who don't understand economics tend to make very bad decisions and here medicine is completely manuring the bed.

 

[TiredSam]

When I was 45 I fell off my bike, and after an MRT scan was told that I had a "bone bruise", which explained the pain in my arm. As an aside, the dr said that bone bruises are only visible with MRT scans, so before MRT came along, anyone complaining of pain in their arm after an accident which couldn't be shown to be due to a break, fracture, sprain etc, would have been accused of malingering.

Well aren't I lucky to be living in the modern, civilized world where such cruel assumptions are a thing of the past, I thought to myself.

Three years later I got M.E.

 

[large donner]

Except some of them pop up later because they should have been diagnosed with MS or Parkinson’s or cancer. By which time they are likely to be more costly to treat as they have gone untreated for years and their illness has become worse than it was when they were being MUSd.

Ah there's a simple way out of that one. Those people die early and have cause of death put down to stroke or heart failure etc which can effectively be claimed to be lifestyle illnesses.