Friday, January 28, 2005

Hopefully we don't act like this

DOCTOR UNABLE TO HIDE HIS EXCITEMENT FROM PATIENT WITH ULTRA-RARE DISEASE
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ROCHESTER, MN—Dr. Erich Stellbrach, a general practitioner at the Mayo Clinic, could barely contain his exhilaration Monday upon discovering that patient Oliver Patterson, 54, has the extremely rare degenerative nerve disease Gertsmann-Straussler-Scheinker syndrome. "Mr. Patterson, I'm so sorry to tell you this, but you have—you're not going to believe it—spinocerebellar ataxia!" Stellbrach said, waving an x-ray of Patterson's spinal cord. "It afflicts only one in 2.9 million people!" Stellbrach recommended Patterson begin aggressive treatment to mitigate his impending brain dysfunction and onset of dementia, and made the patient promise to remain in his care.
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from The Onion

4 comments:

Dreaming again said...

Actually .. I DID have a doctor react like that once. The diagnosis wasn't nearly as severe. His excitement was undeniable. My poor husband thought the doctor was quite out of his mind. It was the second time my husband had met the doctor that I'd been going to for 2 years. I have myasthenia gravis and a whole host of other problems that never seemed to fit into any category and often left us all puzzling (a year and a half ago a lab error found a very high Anti dsDNA making us all realize I'd had lupus which explained all the puzzles)
Well ... I was in there with knee pain. Me and joint pains often left this poor doctor scratching his head. Well, he examined my knee .. and then told me that he felt that it was probably osteoarthritis even though I was too young for it (34)but because of my hypermobile joints and the myasthenia, maybe I had it anyway.
So he did an xray which showed significant osteoarthritis.
He'd NAILED the diagnosis on the first guess ...and he was thrilled. He obviously wasn't thrilled about giving a 34 year old the diagnosis, but when you can't find so many answers ...finding one so quickly ...
He was estatic and it showed and my husband thought he was a nut case and I almost never got him back in the door!

Anonymous said...

very funny - but not really - but very funny!

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