probably a man living in USA
Guaranteed, anyone with access to real healthcare would’ve had that checked out immediately.
but it would take effort to go to make an appointment
Yeah but it would get me a paid day (likely more) off work that doesn’t count against my vacation.
checked out
immediatelyeventuallyftfy
Pros: free healthcare Cons: it takes a month to get an appointment
I was shitting blood, turned grey, and fainted in public. I did go the hospital. They literally said “idk” and sent me home with a 4000$ bill. It kept happening.
Went to a specialist that also resulted in a literal “idk”, and they wouldn’t clear a colonoscopy because I am “too young” and “don’t have a family history.” I was begging them to figure it out because this was a fucking nightmare. Nope. At least the bill was 400$ this time around.
It kept happening for over a year at random. Actually terrifying.
FINALLY, I put myself on a diet of oatmeal and water for a month and slowly introduced new foods every week. I was curious to know if maybe certain foods triggered it?
Turns out: yes. I triggered a reaction using one of my favorite foods/ingredients. No idea why, but I had developed some kind of severe intolerance to it. And I had to figure it out myself.
You can’t just not say what it was
It was definitely something weird that everyone would tell them was the obvious thing.
“I just like dipping my fries in crude oil. What of it?”
Green onions.
Oh nooo that’s so good, is it just green ones?
Ye! It’s very strange. I haven’t noticed an effect from standard white/yellow onions or anything. Just green onions.
Ever since I cut them out of my diet, I’ve never had an issue since.
I did love green onions… but I also love not shitting blood and passing out in front of strangers.
Huh, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as green onions. I’ve only heard of red and white before.
edit: wait, looked it up. Apparently green onions are what we call “scallions” where I’m from.
I’m very sorry that you went through that. I know it sucks with the American healthcare $ystem, but you are always allowed to seek a second opinion and any provider that is opposed to that is a bad provider and you shouldn’t see them again anyways.
One thing to keep in mind about the ER though, is that they’re there to rule out anything that is going to kill you quickly, and if you didn’t lose enough blood to drop your hemoglobin count (a measure of how many red blood cells you have), it is perfectly within the standard of care for them to discharge you and tell you to follow up with your primary care physician or a specialist. The ER has a lot of resources, but not enough resources to fully diagnose every possible problem. They can make sure you’re not on death’s doorstep, and stabilize you if you are, but beyond that, they’re pretty strapped for resources and staffing which make it hard to fully work up every mystery diagnosis.
If I’m going to be charged 4000$, I want a fucking diagnosis.
Unfortunately, a solid diagnosis can be really hard to find and there are a lot of diseases and conditions that require more testing than can be completed in the ER. Part of why the ER is expensive is because the tests they do get come back almost immediately, but they very rarely order the tests that take a long time anyways. Expediency and staffing are the main contributors to the cost of emergency care.
With the example of your case, how would the ER get you the diagnosis of a food intolerance without spending weeks on an elimination diet? There are some allergies that can be tested for, but that testing involves injecting a sample of the offending agent under the skin and watching to see if it causes irritation… but allergies and food intolerances are not the same thing and the only way to test for food intolerances is an elimination diet. For the allergy testing, the ER doesn’t have the samples to do the subcutaneous injections. It’s really only allergy specialists that have those available.
how would the ER get you the diagnosis of a food intolerance without spending weeks on an elimination diet?
They sent me out without literally any clue as to what it was. My body felt like a ticking tine bomb, and I was terrified it would happen again. And it did. Several times. I had no idea it was an intolerance until nearly a year later. My weight kept yoyo-ing and I lost almost 30lbs in 2 months. I was terrified of my own body.
No medical professional told me about the elimination diet or even that it could have been food-related. I got desperate enough to try it on my own after my sister was talking some shit about “cleansing toxins” and mentioned it. I looked it up and did it on my own accord.
I get that ER is for emergencies, sure, but I left with zero answers and didn’t have access to another specialist, as they’re at least an hour and half drive away from my town. And VERY full. Not everyone has access to a second opinion.
This is true and the healthcare access problem is more than just cost. If you’re an hour and a half away from any specialists, then the ER you went to likely doesn’t have access to set up those referrals. I have worked in both metropolitan and rural medical systems, and the biggest problems in rural healthcare are almost always access-based. If a hospital/ER is not in the same medical group as a specialist, they can’t put in emergency referrals to that specialist, and I have worked in rural hospitals that don’t even always have imaging services available. There’s an MRI on a trailer that gets brought around to the various hospitals in the group meaning that each hospital has one day a week or one day every other week where an MRI is available. The other option a small, rural ER has is to call EMS to transfer you to another hospital with more resources, but if your insurance doesn’t like the reason they give, you end up on the hook for that 90 minute ambulance ride. Small community hospitals are really between a rock and a hard place when it comes to connecting patients with resources while trying to avoid unnecessary expenses.
The best advice I have for anyone in a rural area with poor healthcare access is to establish care with a family physician for primary care because, most of the time, the primary care physician is the one that actually gets to the bottom of things or coordinates the referrals for specialists. If you have a standing relationship with a physician, it’s a lot easier to make an appointment and they have a baseline to work from as opposed to starting from scratch like an ER physician has to.
Can relate, my dad sees ‘going to the doctor’ as a personal weakness and thus rarely goes.
I see it as financial weakness and thus rarely go.
Many if not most men are like this. It’s usually their wives or another woman in their lives that drags them in when something is about to fall off. It’s another way in which husbands leave 71% of a household’s ‘mental load’ on their wives, down to their own well being.
Men are raised to bring money into the household, and it can easily be half a years wages to go to the hospital. It’s weird to act like they are being malicious to their partner by being this way.
That’s a whole part of my cynical conservative upbringing that I have to consciously work against.
You can’t do the obvious thing you’re SUPPOSED to do. What are you, some kind of sucker and/or [gay slur]?
Can you really piss blood?
Yeah I’m pretty sure that’s a key sign of kidney failure. It can happen rarely in cases of some crazy workouts, but if this dude is saying all the time then it’s probably something worse.
Also could be a UTI or STI(s). Or he eats beets all the time and isn’t particularly bright. Could be anything, spin the wheel of medical disasters!
but i don’t wanna have kidney failure :(
Just have someone remove your kidneys then!
Piss is blood, in a sense. It’s the bits of your blood that get sieved out and rejected by your kidneys.
Normally those are the only bits supposed to be getting out. But if the filter is busted (kidney trouble) or if the walls of the storage tank it sits in after filtering become damaged (bladder trouble), you can end up pissing actual, unfiltered blood.
Alternatively, you ate something recently with a strong red pigment that can survive digestion, enter the bloodstream, get strained out by the kidneys, and collect in your piss in high enough concentration to turn it red. Beets are a pretty famous culprit.
Not only bladder cancer but a whole bunch of things. I used to run home from work and I would always pee right beforehand so I wouldn’t risk having to find some sort of place to pee, but then I started peeing blood every couple of weeks when my mileage went up to around the 10 mile mark. Apparently hematuria can happen from basically having a totally empty bladder chafe itself raw if you run long enough lol. I quit peeing before leaving work after my doctor recommended giving that a shot and it cleared up
Plenty of reasons. Twice i woke up with my pijama pants full of blood, like, full. No scar, no wound, nothing, just blood. I never knew where it came from (as all places from where it could have come were with blood) but I assume it was urinated. It was a side effect of an antidepressant I was taking that start happening two years after beginning the treatment. I had to change the antidepressant and it never happened again
yes though normally pee is brown/red from myoglobin accumulation (muscle breakdown) which is a sign of many things, some of them normally fine but many are extremely life threatening, and can lead to kidney failure. if your pee is ever brown or red you should most likely see a healthcare professional and have them do a urinalysis.
Yes, even for some minor things. I once got a UTI and didn’t get it checked out for a week (I was mega dumb back then). What pushed me eventually to get a doctor to see me was when I started pissing blood. Not loads, but even a single drop was enough to spook me. Got some antibiotics and all was back to normal in a couple days.
Maybe bro just eats a fuckton of beets
no, stupid questions!
Not going to lie LLMs give pretty solid medical advice. They are trained on huge medical datasets. Works well as long as you have a common problem.
they do not and saying this sort of thing actually harms people. do not trust an llm with anything medical, ever.
llms have no conception (of anything) of truth, you are getting a probabilistic bullshit. in a literal sense.
You do not trust them. Fact check their recommendations. Check the diagnose and see if the symptoms match on google. And if it is something possibly grave then go to a doctor.
But many people do not feel like going to the doctor for every small thing they wonder about.
the effort to fact check the bussshrt machine is exactly the same hs not using the bullshit machine inethe first place.
No it helps suggest the same answer faster.
One could argue who needs Google when you have books as well.
except the “answer” is likely to be wrong such that the same search needs to be done sans ai to verify it. you do not understand ai if you think they provide the same answers, they are probabilistic bullshit machines. Google does not provide answers (well didnt used to, when it was better). it catalogued places to find them. your analogy is more accurately “who needs libraries when you have books”.
Do not ever use llm for medical advice, doing so will literally harm and kill people. if you want bullshit, just make some up, you dont even need the llm for that.
i will repeat this in no uncertain terms, llm cannot provide information, trusting one with your healthcare in any capacity is Stupid. it is stupid, harmful, and will kill people. if you value your health at all, just use normal web searches to get info from medical websites, call nurse hotlines, use urgent cares, call doctors offices for advice or appointments.
My dude you don’t need to believe all medical advice it gives. Just use it to get a feel in the right direction and then check whether the symptoms match. It will often suggest multiple options and rate them by likelyhood.
I do not think you understand how much training these LLM’s have on medical material. They can accurately diagnose almost any common disease it is not like WebMD always suggesting you have stage 5 cancer.
Seriously try it once before going full anti AI mode.
You quite literally cannot trust them, their produced information entropy is too high. I understand how much training they have on medical text, you dont understand how little that means. These models are fundamentally incapable of assessing the truth of a statement, you are using something you dont even understand to give you advice about something it cannot reliably give and lack the expertise needed to understand how accurate they actually are at any given answer, on a topic that directly influences your actual physical wellbeing!
“just try it bro it’s good i promise” you should actually prompt an llm about a topic you know about in detail. the amount of errors are rampant, then apply that same inaccuracy to topics you know nothing about.
my next recommendation is that since you are not a healthcare professional, do not give medical advice like “use llm” as you personally clearly cannot verify the accuracy of llm for this role.