you can live with it and not understand it, but you can also understand it and not be able to empathize what its like to live with it. This statement sucks no matter how you look at it.

Man this one could really go both ways.

Hey folks. This made it to c/all. Just wanna remind everyone that this isn’t a debate club or a place to share your opinions, but a support community for chronically ill people.

I feel like this tweet is conflating 2 different perspectives as the same thing. The doctor will have studied conditions and illnesses in aggregate while the individual experiences it personally on a daily basis. Conclusions drawn from both perspectives can contradict and both be true without invalidating the other. As a result, I don't see either as justified in using there perspective to disqualify the others.

I feel both sides could benefit from taking a more nuanced view of things and more openly listen to one another. I know that's an ideal and is not reflected in many people's experience, sadly, but wanted to highlight that no one need be wrong in this situation.

See it's perfectly understandable to not know every single little detail about the field you're trained in. What sucks is how rarely a doctor will admit they're out of their depth and need to read up on your symptoms or disease. From what I gather, this doesn't seem to just be my experience, but a rather common one. Whenever I see this post, I think about the following encounter.

Me: I have autoimmune hyperthyroidism, so, graves disease Doc: nope, graves disease is autoimmune hypOthyroidism, autoimmune hypERthyroidism is hashimotos

Like. These are so understandable to get mixed up when you're a GP. You've probably heard about each of these for like 10 minutes in uni and then studied about them for one test and forgot about them until they were relevant again. I get it, I've been the same about stuff I've learned in uni. Education isn't purely about retaining facts, and it's not humanly possible to retain every single fact you've ever learned.

What doesn't make sense is that I, who has the disease, is often quite debilitated by it, sees a specialist for it every month, and has to understand which symptoms are related to it and why (the thyroid does so many things, it's pretty complex) so I can report them to the specialist would confuse the disease with the opposite one.

So why tf do you default to me being wrong without a seconds thought or doing a 3sec web search? Think for ONE SECOND and you'll realise it doesn't make sense that I'm confusing the disease with another one that I do not have. Ugh.

She looks like a female Boris Johnson