danielboon
TB Fanatic
from the articleNow why would the Great Healer and Almighty Physician allow this? Lack of Faith?
“We knew what we were getting into,” he said. “We knew the possibilities."
from the articleNow why would the Great Healer and Almighty Physician allow this? Lack of Faith?
from the article
“We knew what we were getting into,” he said. “We knew the possibilities."
well there was a guest pastorWonder if he is one of those that fleeces his flock for fancy clothes, expensive cars, and rolexes.
I tell you, it's getting pretty ugly out there- so many krazy Karens out there that I'm now as likely to cross the street to avoid old white gals as I am young folk :: shake head :: who's winding these witches up? Madcow? CNN? Facebook group think groups? The source is toxic mold, and need be eliminated with extreme prejudice.
Karlyn Borysenko - on Parler/Minds/Gab @Karlyn @DrKarlynB
11m
Today on @glennbeck's show, I talked about how the masks are dehumanizing people. Case in point: Grown woman wishes death upon two young children because they aren't wearing masks and seems to think this is completely normal.
View: https://twitter.com/DrKarlynB/status/1288270774747443202?s=20
This one really hits home and I have no doubt it is true, I had a different issue - for 30 years my extreme (to the point of codeine not always working - when I could get it) "women's problems" resulted in my simply not talking to doctors about it after years of: "are you under stress at work," or "that sort of pain you are describing is really a bit excessive you know," and "do you have an issue about being a woman?" and the every popular "if you just lost weight"....(fair use applies)'Just anxiety': These women's coronavirus symptoms persist but doctors are dismissive
“‘Gaslighting’ is the word I’ve been using repeatedly,” one COVID-19 survivor said. “I’m so ill and some people are telling me this is a figment of my imagination."www.nbcnews.com
These women's coronavirus symptoms never went away. Their doctors' willingness to help did.
“‘Gaslighting’ is the word I’ve been using repeatedly,” said one COVID-19 survivor. “I’m so ill and some people are telling me this is a figment of my imagination."
By Elizabeth Chuck
July 28, 2020, 3:19 PM EDT
The frightening symptoms began in early March, when Ailsa Court of Portland, Oregon, suspects she caught the coronavirus from someone at work. More than four months later, she still has shortness of breath, achiness in her lungs, and a strange tingling in her calves.
But doctors have downplayed Court’s concerns as her health problems have dragged on. At one point, her primary care doctor suggested that perhaps she was just “stressed because of the economy,” she said.
And during a visit to an urgent care center in May — when she feared she might be having a stroke or other neurological problem because she was having memory loss and a crippling migraine, in addition to chest tightness and numbness in her legs — a physician rolled his eyes at her, Court, 35, said. Her issues were nothing more than acid reflux, he told her in a dismissive tone, plus maybe a vitamin deficiency.
The doctor’s diagnosis infuriated Court, a commercial makeup artist, who felt a male patient who went to urgent care with the same set of health concerns would have been taken more seriously.
“‘Gaslighting’ is the word I’ve been using repeatedly,” she said, referring to the psychological tactic of making a person second-guess whether something they know to be true is real. “I’m so ill and some people are telling me this is a figment of my imagination. It truly feels like a nightmare.”
Court is not alone. Across the country, many coronavirus survivors with long-lasting symptoms, particularly women, are dealing with dual frustrations: debilitating health conditions that won’t go away, and doctors who tell them the issue might be all in their heads.
Despite their oath to do no harm, medical professionals’ judgment can be inadvertently altered by deeply ingrained unconscious biases, experts say, and the “hysterical female” patient has long been a dangerous stereotype in medicine.
While there are no studies on how female coronavirus patients are treated compared to male ones, past research reveals a disturbing pattern. Women who are in pain are more likely than men to receive sedatives instead of pain medication; women with the same type of pain as men who go to an emergency department have to wait longer to be seen; and women are up to three times more likely to die after a heart attack than men as a result of unequal care.
In addition to gender, race and ethnicity are major contributors in the type of medical care people receive: Data show that Black patients in acute pain are 40 percent less likely than white patients to receive medication, and Latino patients are 25 percent less likely than white patients.
And while income, education and other socioeconomic factors explain some differences in health outcomes for minorities, experts believe those alone don’t account for all disparities — including the significantly higher rate of maternal mortality among Black women in the United States. They point to implicit biases on the part of health care providers as one explanation.
Dismissed as a ‘mental issue’ or anxiety
Alisa Valdés, 51, an Albuquerque, New Mexico, novelist who, along with her 19-year-old son, Alexander, has been sick since mid-March, has been told by doctors that her problems were a “mental issue,” despite very real physical complications of her illness, including emergency surgery to remove her gallbladder. The doctors, she says, have been “minimizing me as a woman, minimizing me as a Latina.”
“Nobody is going to come right out and say that they’re discriminating against you for those reasons,” she said. “So what do I have to go by? Intuition, instinct, past experience. The attitude of certain providers. The way they look at you. The way they don’t look at you. The way they shrug you off.”
Valdés’ symptoms have included extreme burning in her digestive tract, unbearable pain in her sternum and upper back, and a loss of appetite. She feels doctors’ biases have influenced the way they treat her son, too: When she took him into the emergency room two months ago because his heart was racing, she said she was stunned when doctors automatically assumed his heart rate must be elevated because he was on drugs, which he has never taken.
Other coronavirus survivors say it is hard to parse out whether their gender or race factored into the response they got from doctors. All they know is they have had their symptoms written off.
Adrienne Crenshaw, 38, of Houston, who is Black, says she has not witnessed explicit racism or sexism during the multiple trips to the emergency room that she has made since she got the coronavirus in mid-June. She has had shooting pains around her heart, skyrocketing blood pressure and tingling in her arms and legs, and has gone to the hospital several times worried she might be having a heart attack.
Doctors have prescribed anti-anxiety medications to Crenshaw, a bartender and former fitness competitor, despite her insistence that her symptoms are not a result of anxiety. Her father died of the coronavirus July 10 — but she has learned not to mention that to her medical providers, since it usually prompts them to suggest her problems are a manifestation of grief and stress.
On one trip earlier this month, she overheard a doctor talking about her to his team with disdain, but she didn’t know why.
“He said, ‘The girl’s perfectly normal, there’s nothing wrong with her,’” she said. “And in my head, I’m like, ‘I’m not perfectly fine. I don’t just go in the ER to take a room up.’”
An effort to help coronavirus ‘long-haulers’
The medical community as a whole has not ignored these so-called coronavirus long-haulers. Health care providers throughout the United States have been working to figure out why they are not getting better, and a handful of post-COVID clinics have sprung up across the country for patients who are having neurological and physical difficulties months after they first got sick.
And in recent weeks, to the relief of long-haulers, top public health officials have recognized that COVID-19 symptoms can last for lengthy periods of time. On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged in a report that as many as a third of individuals who were never sick enough to be hospitalized are not entirely better up to three weeks after their diagnosis. Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases doctor, has said more research is needed on individuals who appear to be suffering from a post-viral syndrome.
Experts say there are many reasons why doctors do not have solutions for patients experiencing prolonged complications from the coronavirus, starting with the obvious: The virus has not been seen before, and they are learning about it in real time.
Dr. Jessica Dine, director of the advanced consultative pulmonary section at Penn Medicine and a pulmonologist who has been treating patients whose symptoms have not let up, said even if a clinician has not seen a set of symptoms associated with the coronavirus before, there are ways to show patients they are still being heard.
“The first step is to recognize that these symptoms are real,” said Dine, who along with her colleagues, has seen patients with ongoing respiratory issues, as well as many of the problems cited by the women interviewed in this story: tingling and numbness in their hands and feet, heart rate and blood pressure fluctuations, and extreme fatigue and dizziness.
“The frustrating part for the patient and the clinician is, we don’t know if this is going to get better and when,” she said.
Carrianne Ekberg, 37, a social media consultant in Gig Harbor, Washington, said she has not received that kind of sensitivity from her health care providers. She tested positive for the coronavirus April 1 and still has times when the shortness of breath and back pain she experienced when she first tested positive return. She also still has days where she is so fatigued, she can’t get out of bed. But doctors have said there is nothing they can do for her and have suggested perhaps she caught another virus on top of the coronavirus or is suffering from anxiety.
“I know they’re probably under a lot of stress and seeing a lot of patients, but it’s so easy to just write, ‘You’re probably going to be okay, this seems to be normal, don’t worry about it, let’s talk again in a few months, keep me posted,’” she said. “That is the type of response I think COVID survivors want to hear, not ‘you have another virus’ or ‘you need to seek mental health help because you’re probably crazy.’”
Avoiding implicit bias
To combat unconscious biases that can affect treatment, clinicians typically are given protocols to follow — checklists to run through to make sure they don’t miss a diagnosis, said Dr. Melissa Simon, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology and the director of the Center for Health Equity Transformation at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. When someone goes into the emergency room with chest pains, for example, there is an exhaustive list of laboratory tests that need to be ordered and vital signs that need to be checked to run through possible diagnoses.
With the coronavirus, and the problems it is causing long term, there is not yet a protocol to follow, Simon said.
“We are constructing that list and that differential as we are literally flying the airplane,” she said.
Still, it is within a patient’s rights to ask a doctor why they arrived at the conclusion they did, or to inquire what other diagnoses were ruled out, she added.
Simon said it did not surprise her that women with long-term coronavirus symptoms were having a hard time getting doctors to believe them.
“There are long-standing biases that are omnipresent,” she said.
And while it’s hard when a coronavirus patient is already stressed from being sick, “we have to acknowledge that what the patient is telling us is real, and we have to seek to understand how best to address it,” she said.
Court, the Oregon makeup artist, has been hesitant to contact doctors again after they dismissed so many of her symptoms. Her situation has been compounded by the fact that she never got a positive COVID-19 test: When she first got sick in March, several days after close contact with a woman at work who was sneezing and coughing and had just returned from Italy, then a coronavirus hot spot, her doctor repeatedly refused to give her a test, saying the state did not have the testing capacity. By the time Court arranged to pay for one out of pocket from a private company one month later, the result was negative; she is still certain that she, as well as her husband and two kids, had the coronavirus nonetheless.
The rest of Court’s family has since recovered, but she lives in a state of unknown with her health. Some days, she loses her breath doing household activities, or gets a fever that tops 100 F; on other days, she feels OK. This makes it difficult for her to commit to work. A runner, she is no longer training for a half-marathon like she was before she got sick, and now finds herself panting even from a walk in the woods with her family.
But what has been most frustrating to her is that doctors have doubted her so many times that she has started to doubt herself. Her husband, a former Army combat medic, has been a reality check, reminding her how severe her symptoms are and how many nights she has feared she will die in her sleep.
“I have to remind myself I’m not making this up,” Court said.
She feels the political debates across the U.S. over the coronavirus are making it even harder for patients to be believed.
“Everybody is in this state of questioning reality,” she said. “From the get-go, this country has been gaslit about COVID, and now on an individual level, patients are being gaslit.”
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I keep having strange post CV19 things happening. Yesterday I just felt horrible. Sore throat, runny nose. Temperature was strange ranging from 99 all the way to 96 in a matter of minutes. Has this now caused thyroid issues?My last 2 medical providers were like evil twin and good twin. 2 women and both about the same age.
The first complained about having to wear a a mask and demanded that I accept allergies as the only explanation. She got mad and spoke in anger when I tried to ask about my low blood pressure spells. I swear the virus deniers are trying to kill people
The second had the mask and shield, because I was still fully symptomatic, right down to taste and smell being gone. She listened intently and explained that covid was a long recovery for many. I'm not her only long haul patient
Thanks to her, I'm going to get a heart test at the local hospital. Because apparently 80/50 to 70/40 are not good numbers for BP, and I feel really really bad when it happens. Last one was last night. Still feel like crap now, but not as bad as last night and BP Is in the normal range again.
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I was healthy pre covid. Now, I'm not. It's not an old person disease! But most won't take it seriously until they or their family member rolls the bad covid dice. I know at least one child in my community's, aged 10, has bee continually sick with it for months.
Most people who got polio didn't need the iron lung. But no one is stupid enough now to say that most survived, so no precautions should be taken. Or we have treatments, so we should just let it burn through.
It must be terribly scary to have this new virus and no one has a clue as to how to treat lingering symptoms. I hope the medical community all get together and collaborate on successful treatments. I wonder if the ongoing headaches are the result of the coughing? Would an Albuterol inhaler help?(fair use applies)One-third of COVID-19 patients who aren't hospitalized have long-term illness, CDC says
One patient whose symptoms have lingered for months called the report "monumental."www.nbcnews.com
CDC: One-third of COVID-19 patients who aren't hospitalized have long-term illness
One patient whose symptoms have lingered for months called the report "monumental."
By Erika Edwards
July 24, 2020, 1:39 PM EDT
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged Friday that a significant number of COVID-19 patients do not recover quickly, and instead experience ongoing symptoms, such as fatigue and cough.
As many as a third of patients who were never sick enough to be hospitalized are not back to their usual health up to three weeks after their diagnosis, the report found.
"COVID-19 can result in prolonged illness even among persons with milder outpatient illness, including young adults," the report's authors wrote.
The acknowledgement is welcome news to patients who call themselves "long-haulers" — suffering from debilitating symptoms weeks and even months after their initial infection.
"This report is monumental for all of us who have been struggling with fear of the unknown, lack of recognition and many times, a lack of belief and proper care from medical professionals during our prolonged recovery from COVID-19," Kate Porter, who is on day 129 of her recovery, wrote in an email to NBC News.
Porter, 35, of Beverly, Massachusetts, has had low-grade fevers, fatigue, rapid heart beat, shortness of breath and memory and sleep issues since her diagnosis March 17.
"This gives me hope that we will gain access to more resources throughout our recovery and hopefully, get our lives back to what they once were," Porter wrote.
The CDC report is based on telephone surveys of 274 COVID-19 patients. Ninety-five of those patients, or 35 percent, said they "had not returned to their usual state of health" when they were surveyed, which was at least two to three weeks after their first test.
Many with long-term symptoms are otherwise young and healthy: Among those surveyed between ages 18 and 34, about 20 percent experienced lasting symptoms.
"This report indicates that even among symptomatic adults tested in outpatient settings, it might take weeks for resolution of symptoms and return to usual health," the CDC authors wrote.
The report also pointed out that in contrast, "over 90 percent of outpatients with influenza recover within approximately two weeks" after a positive flu test.
Among the patients who experienced lasting symptoms in the CDC report, 71 percent reported fatigue, 61 percent had lasting cough, and 61 percent reported ongoing headaches.
The CDC added that preventative measures, such as physical distancing, face masks and frequent hand-washing, continue to be important to slow the spread of COVID-19.
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