Re: MD response to Dinah DOES have pertussis

[Guest guest]

I have lost my patience with you all. You criticize doctors in the most pegorative terms and paint us as ignorant buffoons who care nothing about your children. You create adversarial relationships with us because you think we are the enemy. I am a s Hopkins-educated physican specializing in family medicine and, though, I have met many doctors who lack understanding and bed-side manner (probably because they're autistic too), I have never met one who didn't care, who didn't spend sleepless nights thinking of or caring for his or her patients. Let me assure you that physicians care. We would not endure that which we do if we did not. Perhaps if you would make an effort to understand us you would have more positive experiences with us. We go to school for no less than 8 years after highschool. During medical school we

rely on the knowledge, skills and wisdom of our professors, our mentors to build us up after the rigors of school have deconstructed us. Then we have 3 years (at least) of post-graduate training. While in training we participate in at least three educational conferences a day in addition to caring for our patients. We jump through firey hoops at all hours of the day and night. We work 80 to 120 hours a week for very little pay ( as little as $5.60 per hour). You try resuscitating a newborn in the middle of the night while you have to take care of a patient crashing in the ICU and the family of the brain-dead teenage mother who OD'd. HAve you had a nine-month old baby die in your arms and then have to go home after two or three hours of sleep (if you are lucky) to your own family with its own set of unique needs. During medical school and our first year of residency training we pass three standardized

national medical board exams each of which is 7 to 8 hours long and for which we study for months. Once we are done with residency, we have to pass our specialty certification boards. Some of us have to practice for a couple of years before we can even take them. Once we are done with residency and we are in practice we start repaying our loans. I didn't have to pay for undergrad and I had a scholarship for med school tuition and I started my career with $85,000 in educational loan debt, a pittance compared to the debt of some. In practice, we are mandated to see as many as 40 patients a day. Why? Because medicare and insurance payments are going down; medicaid rarely sends a check; health care expense are increasing; insurance costs and other employee benefits have skyrocketed and we physicians have to see more patients, do more paperwork, answer to insurance companies that

question our every medical move in order to support our families and pay our staff. So we work endlessly; put our own health at risk; incur huge amounts of debt while our classmates have gone of to become bank presidents; study relentlessly; ask our families to sacrifice right along with us all because we are stupid and don't care? Now let's look at the World of Autism. Research of autism is in its infancy - it is 20 years old. Until the late 1990s, there weren't a lot of autistic people to study. Every autisitc child is unique - predicatably unpredictable, consistently inconsistent unlike Downs children who all have several shared characteristics. Autism manifests itself in a million different ways. How do researchers reliably study such an enigma? Now, remember we doctors have been trained by other doctors - doctors who are older than us,

doctors who have had little orr no experience with autism. The missions of our educators is to teach us that which will serve the most people in the best way possible using evidenced-based medicine. Also recall, we spend thousands of hours in residency caring for hospitalized patients and those who are poor, indigent, underserved by the rest of the world while we are studying new advances in medicine and preparing for our exams and looking for real jobs and starting families. Then, when we are employed we work 60 hours a week so that we can pay the bills because the government and big business won't pay us what we are worth. So, the World of Autism knows little about autism because research has really juist begun. Medical educators know little about autism because research has just begun. Physicians, whose job it is to treat or help treat patients, have no definitive treatment for autism. Most of you parents spend hours upon hours every week researching this topic, finding some good studies, some flawed studies, anecdotal evidence, inflammatory and insulting comments because you have to care for your autistic family member(s). Docotrs spend hours every week doing the same but we have thousands of patients with hundreds of problems, only one of which is autism. I am a doctor but more importantly I am the mother of two autistic children. I believe that autism is caused by a gene that is unmasked by some other exposure, likely environmental. I do believe that immunizations and mercury contribute to the problem likely by doing the unmasking. I also know that vaccines have saved the lives of millions of people and reduced the suffering of the world on a large scale.Robin Nemeth <r_nemeth@...> wrote: >You know any idiot could diagnose that cough, that bark, that >whooping cough , over the phone Debbie.>>Our doc did.>She heard it and knew. And yes our daughter had her DPT series.>And yes I caught it vicariously.>I guess that was the problem with the doctors we had at Kaiser Permanente. They weren't idiots. Ha.The doctor who saw me a couple of years ago, when my whole family came down with whooping cough, told me that I had either Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, or asthma. My husband diagnosed it, eventually, by finding a wav file online, and the sound is pretty distinctive, as well as the length of time that the cough lasts. This _____ (insert some other word for idiot here, since I can't call her that) who saw me asked me, when I came back for the third time in about two months because my cough wasn't clearing up, if I was just trying

to get out of going to work. (I told her "yeah i wish. i'm a stay at home mom...)No, idiot is not the word for her.

Photos – Showcase holiday pictures in hardcover Photo Books. You design it and we’ll bind it!

[Guest guest]

Since you are a doctor then you should know that some of your colleagues are EXACTLY what some people are explaining here.

C'mon its in any field. There are good and bad.

You should also have no problem acknowledging that the way medicine is taught is WAY TOO MUCH OF "this is how I learned it, so this is how you will learn it"

You're delirious if you think all doctors are like you.

Everyday those of us on this list and in this community are scoffed at for our beliefs --a doctor tells me I am crazy for thinking what I am thinking and what I am supposed to say to him, "Oh, you are right doctor, I am sorry, your student loan debt (which is not much more than mine), the hard hours you work (which are not much more than mine), and your dedication to your job (which is again, not unlike mine) gives you the right to belittle the evidence I bring to you and treat me like shit and dismiss me like a child. My bad! Carry on! May I kiss you feet?"

I am sorry, but I have no respect for those doctors. They are ignorant idiots. Its doesn't take much more effort to actually listen to your patients and truly look into the things they are telling you.

Similar situation to this original thread... my aunt was telling my cousin doctor for a month, that she had pertussis and they wouldn't listen to her.

Fact is some doctors are wonderful and some doctors are CRAP.

Re: MD response to Dinah DOES have pertussis

I have lost my patience with you all. ...

[Guest guest]

Oh well, if it's time for a pity

party, puhleeeease let me join in!

So, you've worked your butt off, and the managed care fiasco that we call

a health care system in this country is using and abusing you? Oh well

you poor baby you! Maybe if you went to Canada or someplace where they

spend more on socialized medicine, you'd get better treatment. Or better

yet, perhaps you can find someplace on the planet where the market still

drives what doctors and patients both are willing to pay for and put up

with.

So you've got years of education and you're treated like crap? Oooh poor

baby. Would you like to know what it's like to grow up knowing that you

are autistic? Oh I’ve called my condition by various names. At one time

and from my earliest days, almost as far back as I can remember in fact,

it was merely ‘the curse’. Then it was ‘something like autism’. Then it

was aspergers, then it was ‘topic finding disorder’. How about if I

explain what it is like to be in my shoes, now, since we've all got a

load of what it's like to be in yours?

Do you know what, I have quite a bit of education, too. Maybe not as much

as you do, but quite a bit. I have a degree in civil engineering, and I

was a registered professional engineer in the State of Ohio. That and

eighty cents will buy me a cup of coffee. Do you know why? Because I

don’t chit chat. You may laugh all you want to, but until you know

how much this means to most everyone, you have no right. Do you know that

saying “we’re so close, we’re comfortable not saying anything to each

other?” Let me tell you something, this saying is bull excrement. There

is no such thing. Every person on the planet, unless they know you’re

about to hop into bed with them, is going to be made uncomfortable by any

other person who won’t speak to them beyond “hi how are you?”. They are

going to do everything in their power to flee that person as fast as they

can. Until you’ve had this reaction a few thousand times from other

people, please don’t whine to me about how bad you have it.

Do you know what the most important skill is for anyone who works for a

government agency? Ask Brown, he’ll tell you. It’s the ability to

schmooze. If I had understood this when I went into highway engineering,

I would have become a plumber or maybe an auto mechanic.

Here is what you are going to do, if you think you have it so tough. This

is how you will find out what it is like to be high functioning autistic.

You are going to get yourself some nice strong skunk essence. And before

you walk out of your door each morning, you are going to smear it on your

body. And this won’t make you anything like an autistic person, because

autistic people don’t smell bad. But I guarantee you that it will make

people react to you in exactly the same way they react to most high

functioning autistic people. They will flee you. They might give you a

crooked smile before they do, but you will know, you will see how

obviously forced it is. Because you’ll be smelly, not stupid. And you

will go to your job (the one you got because you can pretend you don’t

have a problem, for thirty minutes or so in a job interview), if you can

keep it, and you will find that no one really wants to work with you. Oh

maybe they will never say as much because you’ll make them understand

that this little problem that you have is something that you can’t help.

But that won’t matter. Perhaps your employer will never be able to fire

you, legally, but that won’t matter. Your patients will be so unnerved by

you, as well as your coworkers, that they will have no choice but to make

it clear to you without coming right out and saying so that you are quite

unwanted and unwelcome.

Ok perhaps I don’t understand what it is like to raise a child who is

well into the autism spectrum. I know only what it was like twelve years

ago to fear that my child might be autistic, and that in itself was hell

on earth. I thank God that she is doing as well as she is. But when I

think back on her first three months of life, the incessant screaming

like somebody had stuck a fork into her (oh I’m sorry I don’t mean

incessant. She did cease screaming when she was eating and when she would

finally screamed herself to sleep), and then remember how her

pediatrician used to smile at me and say (er, I mean scream at me, as he

couldn’t be heard over the screams of my daughter otherwise) “oh it’s

nothing serious, really, some babies just do this”, when I think back on

the days (often a week or more) that she went without a bowel movement,

and how psychotic she would begin to act, I still get very very angry. I

am thankful to God that she is pretty much fine. But I am very very angry

that the people who did this to her, who did much, much worse to your s

and to many other children, are paying no price.

How do researchers reliably study such an enigma? Let me tell you how you

DON’T study it. By closing the book on further government money going

toward what to many parents and doctors alike would appear to be the most

promising areas of study. By doing everything you can to smear parents

and scientists who support claims of a link between mercury and autism as

stupid or lunatic. By hiding publically funded data and refusing to make

it available to the public.

You know what is ironic. I think that we are both bitter about the same

thing. A system that allowed these things to happen to both of us.

Because I have news for you. It is the same system. The government that

poisoned me and then my children and is now trying to cover it up is the

very same government that passed the laws that allow these managed care

and public health care bureaucrats and priviledged pharmaceutical company

ceos to flourish. The people who allowed these vaccines to be made,

ooops, with hundreds of times the levels of mercury that are safe, are

the same people who funneled three quarters of a billion dollars of

lobbying money into your congress.

(http://www.publicintegrity.org/rx/report.aspx?aid=723)

And for what, do you

think? Walter says that if you believe that it is because they

have a deep interest in congressmen doing their jobs of upholding and

defending the U.S. Constitution, then you probably also believe in the

easter bunny. Tell me something, do you believe that these people care a

whit about all of your hard work. I am laughing, because I believe they

care as much about your hard work as they do about the fact that my child

spent the first three months of her life screaming like somebody had

stuck a fork into her.

The people in the mains stream media who refuse to cover the thimerosal

story are the same people who refuse to cover the three quarters of a

billion in lobbying money that drug companies gave to congress, and the

same people who refused to cover the vaccine maker indemnity clause that

was snuck through congress with the last defense bill. They are the same

people who hardly mention that health care costs are up three times the

rate of inflation in the last decade or so. Are the salaries of doctors

like you up three times the rate of inflation, I wonder?

I do not hate all doctors. And nowhere did I paint all doctors with the

same brush. You sure are reacting awfully defensively and taking this

awfully personally.

I do believe it is easy to fall into apathy and arrogance when

people have so little choices in their medical care. Oh sure, if I am

rich I can choose any doctor I like. Just as I can choose any school for

my children that I would like. But if I am dependent on what my hmo is

providing, do you know how many DAN doctors I will find? You guessed

it--I have no choice at all.

One of my particularly bad nightmares has to do with picturing what this

country will be like, as bad as things are now, when and if we go to

socialized medicine. Americans believe they have a right to this, though,

just as they feel they have a right to support a president who violates

the law, ostensibly for their protection, and just as they feel they have

a right to insist that everyone must be inoculated for the safety of the

herd. Well guess what. I am not a cow. If you don’t like my speaking out

against some doctors, then don’t listen. I am sorry if my comments

offended you personally. But I don’t understand why they should. And as a

mother of autistic children I don’t understand for the life of me how you

could be aware of the existence of one tenth of the evidence that is

available regarding mercury, and not be incensed by what you’ve seen and

heard, and not insist that others be made aware of it.

Robin Nemeth

At 09:57 AM 1/18/2006 -0800, Kathleen delaCruz wrote:

I have lost my patience with you

all. You criticize doctors in the most pegorative terms and paint

us as ignorant buffoons who care nothing about your children. You create

adversarial relationships with us because you think we are the

enemy. I am a s Hopkins-educated physican specializing in

family medicine and, though, I have met many doctors who lack

understanding and bed-side manner (probably because they're autistic

too), I have never met one who didn't care, who didn't spend sleepless

nights thinking of or caring for his or her patients.

Let me assure you that physicians care. We would not endure that

which we do if we did not. Perhaps if you would make an effort to

understand us you would have more positive experiences with us.

We go to school for no less than 8 years after highschool.

During medical school we rely on the knowledge, skills and wisdom of our

professors, our mentors to build us up after the rigors of school have

deconstructed us. Then we have 3 years (at least) of post-graduate

training. While in training we participate in at least three

educational conferences a day in addition to caring for our

patients. We jump through firey hoops at all hours of the day and

night. We work 80 to 120 hours a week for very little pay ( as

little as $5.60 per hour). You try resuscitating a newborn in the

middle of the night while you have to take care of a patient crashing in

the ICU and the family of the brain-dead teenage mother who OD'd.

HAve you had a nine-month old baby die in your arms and then have to go

home after two or three hours of sleep (if you are lucky) to your own

family with its own set of unique needs.

During medical school and our first year of residency training we pass

three standardized national medical board exams each of which is 7 to 8

hours long and for which we study for months. Once we are done with

residency, we have to pass our specialty certification boards. Some

of us have to practice for a couple of years before we can even take

them.

Once we are done with residency and we are in practice we start repaying

our loans. I didn't have to pay for undergrad and I had a scholarship for

med school tuition and I started my career with $85,000 in educational

loan debt, a pittance compared to the debt of some.

In practice, we are mandated to see as many as 40 patients a day.

Why? Because medicare and insurance payments are going down;

medicaid rarely sends a check; health care expense are increasing;

insurance costs and other employee benefits have skyrocketed and we

physicians have to see more patients, do more paperwork, answer to

insurance companies that question our every medical move in order to

support our families and pay our staff.

So we work endlessly; put our own health at risk; incur huge amounts of

debt while our classmates have gone of to become bank presidents; study

relentlessly; ask our families to sacrifice right along with us all

because we are stupid and don't care?

Now let's look at the World of Autism. Research of autism is in its

infancy - it is 20 years old. Until the late 1990s, there weren't a

lot of autistic people to study. Every autisitc child is unique -

predicatably unpredictable, consistently inconsistent unlike Downs

children who all have several shared characteristics. Autism

manifests itself in a million different ways. How do researchers

reliably study such an enigma?

Now, remember we doctors have been trained by other doctors -

doctors who are older than us, doctors who have had little orr no

experience with autism. The missions of our educators is to teach

us that which will serve the most people in the best way possible using

evidenced-based medicine. Also recall, we spend thousands of

hours in residency caring for hospitalized patients and those who are

poor, indigent, underserved by the rest of the world while we are

studying new advances in medicine and preparing for our exams and looking

for real jobs and starting families. Then, when we are employed we

work 60 hours a week so that we can pay the bills because the government

and big business won't pay us what we are worth.

So, the World of Autism knows little about autism because research has

really juist begun. Medical educators know little about autism

because research has just begun. Physicians, whose job it is to

treat or help treat patients, have no definitive treatment for

autism.

Most of you parents spend hours upon hours every week researching this

topic, finding some good studies, some flawed studies, anecdotal

evidence, inflammatory and insulting comments because you have to care

for your autistic family member(s). Docotrs spend hours every week

doing the same but we have thousands of patients with hundreds of

problems, only one of which is autism.

I am a doctor but more importantly I am the mother of two autistic

children. I believe that autism is caused by a gene that is

unmasked by some other exposure, likely environmental. I do believe

that immunizations and mercury contribute to the problem likely by doing

the unmasking. I also know that vaccines have saved the lives of

millions of people and reduced the suffering of the world on a large

scale.

[Guest guest]

> >I find it a little funny and quite ironinc that you chose to post

> >your rant against parents of kids with autism who criticize

doctors

> >in direct response to a mother's story of her doctor's

incompetence

> >in diagnosing AND treating pertussis, even when that mother told

the

> >doctor she believed it was pertussis.

>

> Actually, I never did tell the doctor that we felt it was

pertussis. My

> husband diagnosed what we had after I'd seen her a few times and

she had

> told me I had asthma or copd (she never did explain why everyone

in my

> family came down with asthma or copd all at the same time). And

then after

> our coughs all went away three months after they started, I never

did go

> back to that doctor. So in all fairness maybe she would have been

open to

> what my husband discovered, if I had ever brought it up with her.

But I

> just never really had any reason to.

>

Robin,

I was actually referring to DebiH's " Dinah DOES have pertussis "

thread. I guess in referring to stories of parents who bring their

children to the dr with pertussis and the dr can't see it staring

him right in the face, I must be more specific, LOL!

[Guest guest]

In a message dated 1/18/2006 12:59:44 PM Eastern Standard Time, kellydlc@... writes:

I also know that vaccines have saved the lives of millions of people and reduced the suffering of the world on a large scale.

Really? Got proof? Injecting filth and heavy metal has done nothing but harm the millions of people of the world. Geezzz how many more generation of children have to be harmed before the medical community wakes up?

All the best,"Parents should decide through informed choice, which vaccines if any should begiven to their children"Vaccine Information or vaccinetruth.org Callahan Vaccine Liberation Co-director

[Guest guest]

I told the nurse all 3 times and the doctor twice that I suspected

pertussis. The reason I didn't the first time is simple. I wanted to

see if he would give her a diagnosis based on clinical symptoms or on

vaccine record paranoia. Evidently I was correct, but then again, he

never checked her records to see her health history, rofl, which isn't

supposed to be done in medicine, right?

Debi

> >I find it a little funny and quite ironinc that you chose to post

> >your rant against parents of kids with autism who criticize doctors

> >in direct response to a mother's story of her doctor's incompetence

> >in diagnosing AND treating pertussis, even when that mother told the

> >doctor she believed it was pertussis.

>

> Actually, I never did tell the doctor that we felt it was pertussis. My

> husband diagnosed what we had after I'd seen her a few times and she

had

> told me I had asthma or copd (she never did explain why everyone in my

> family came down with asthma or copd all at the same time). And then

after

> our coughs all went away three months after they started, I never

did go

> back to that doctor. So in all fairness maybe she would have been

open to

> what my husband discovered, if I had ever brought it up with her. But I

> just never really had any reason to.

>

[Guest guest]

>I also know that vaccines have saved the lives of millions of people and reduced the suffering of the world on a large scale.<

You don't KNOW, you only believe what you have been told by your "wiser" professors. You still won't allow yourself to believe that they could be wrong. Interesting, you say that autism is new yet the medical profession continues to say that it is just better diagnosis and that it was here all along. I DO respect you for all you have gone through to become a doctor, but I believe that doctors rely too heavily on drug companies and medicine to the detriment of us all. My doctor believes that Tristan and any child who acquired autism from vaccines is "defective" in their gene pool. I say we are human and aren't designed to ingest poisons without consequence. He believes in the defective gene theory because the AMA says it is so. That is why my faith in doctors has waned.

C.

[Guest guest]

Is anyone else out there concerned that a medical professional with so

many years of education cannot spell????

[Guest guest]

I'm not offended by someone saying that a given disorder, like autism,

is genetic, so long as there's proof. There's just as much

scientifically-valid proof of thimerosal/mercury poisoning as the

cause as there is genetic evidence, yet these same people who claim

genes state there's no evidence to support mercury as causal. Either

you stand by your methodology or you don't, we can't pick and choose

because one sounds better or is less stressful or painful to consider

than the other.

Debi

>

> >I also know that vaccines have saved the lives of millions of

people and reduced the suffering of the world on a large scale.<

>

> You don't KNOW, you only believe what you have been told by your

" wiser " professors. You still won't allow yourself to believe that

they could be wrong. Interesting, you say that autism is new yet the

medical profession continues to say that it is just better diagnosis

and that it was here all along. I DO respect you for all you have

gone through to become a doctor, but I believe that doctors rely too

heavily on drug companies and medicine to the detriment of us all. My

doctor believes that Tristan and any child who acquired autism from

vaccines is " defective " in their gene pool. I say we are human and

aren't designed to ingest poisons without consequence. He believes in

the defective gene theory because the AMA says it is so. That is why

my faith in doctors has waned.

>

> C.

>

[Guest guest]

No, 'cause I saw all of my typos...

<g>

Debi

>

> Is anyone else out there concerned that a medical professional with so

> many years of education cannot spell????

>

[Guest guest]

That's true. I know many very smart people who are terrible spellers. My

grandfather was

an engineer for westinghouse... he was a genius. Couldn't spell.

My father, a brilliant artist and multi-talented jack of many trades (who could

paint a

portrait, write a poem about it and set it to music...all the while designing

and building a

room addition with a curved staircase...can't spell either. Or cook,

unfortunately!

>

> no. Spelling wasn't even formalized until 1800 or so.

> The English language is one of the oddest when it comes to spelling and many

brilliant

people are poor spellers.

>