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Comment by RoyTyrell | Hacker News Reader

My girlfriend's sister suffers from Long Covid for going on 2yrs now.

Some of the problems she had early on is that most doctors wrote her off as either lying or anxiety. More than one ER doc said there's no way that Covid could ever cause lasting symptoms other than lung damage, which she didn't have, so it's likely just anxiety. There was one DO she saw, during an admit for tachycardia, who said that he believed that she has a post-viral syndrome and knew of others with other post-Covid issues. The problem would be trying to convince his colleagues to believe it would be an uphill battle, so he hoped it was temporary for her. I know things have changed now but some doctors can be extremely arrogant and dismissive of patients (female patients more than male).

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> but trying to get his colleagues to believe it would be an uphill battle

You have to go through a lot of education to become a doctor, so people naturally expect doctor's to be wise, but the truth is they are just good a memorizing things. They aren't necessarily smarter than any other person and have just as many blindspots.

* Source: My dad and uncle are doctors. My brother in law is a doctor. I have a friend who is a doctor. And I've known a lot of other doctors through them.

I dated a med school student for all of medschool and some rotations. Thus I have countless doctor friends now from those years. Everytime I bring up the reality of what most doctors are like, I get downvoted on HN for some reason.

The doctor I dated for years never drank water. She loved diet coke. She ate mcdonalds constantly but avoided the bun. She was skinny though. I had to teach her how to pump gas because her dad did it for her until she was 22. She loved cocaine and moly. Currently cycles Adderall and Ritalin (or something very similar) so she doesnt get too used to one or the other. I could list 20 other 'wtf?' type of things about her. Most others are similarly weird, careless, unhealthy, confused and logicless.

> She ate mcdonalds constantly but avoided the bun

If she also skipped the fries (and had salad instead) that wouldn't be the worst imaginable diet.

She must not have been that bad if you dated her for years.

She was an ok girlfriend. She's not the intellectual caring doctor people imagine when discussing advice from doctors.

> Everytime I bring up the reality of what most doctors are like

Is your insight that doctors are regular educated humans suffering from the same flaws and vices as other regular educated humans?

> She loved cocaine and moly. Currently cycles Adderall and Ritalin (or something very similar) so she doesn’t get too used to one or the other.

Not sure what this is supposed to imply. I expect the same can also be said for at least 20% of doctors, dentists, SV, Big Law, Wall Street and Main Street in the 20-29 age range.

Drug abuse, alcohol abuse, no knowledge of anything real world other than your job, are not qualities of "regular educated people".

They are modern qualities of the loud morality failed majority these days. Just because it's common for celebrities and kids of rich people to do drugs and screw around, doesn't mean that's what my parents expect from their doctors.

> Drug abuse, alcohol abuse, no knowledge of anything real world other than your job, are not qualities of "regular educated people".

Actually they are, your statement applies to any one of the examples I gave you of what society considers successful/prestigious careers. Silicon Valley is the poster child for stimulant and hallucinogen use/abuse, are they not similarly regular educated people?

> Just because it's common for celebrities and kids of rich people to do drugs and screw around

Where are you getting the idea that it's only common amongst celebrities and kids of rich people?

> They are modern qualities of the loud morality failed majority these days.

I don't even know what "loud morality failed majority" means but morality (particularly your personal definition of it) =/= professional competency.

The disconnect here seems to be your expectations (and definition of morality but that's a separate point). Your parents, and you, seem to be unaware of how common stimulant, alcohol and drug use is amongst white-collar professionals.

Sorry to disappoint but as a group physicians are no different. This has no relevance on professional competency. Fun fact for you the "fathers of modern medicine" who have all the diseases named after them and designed the residency education system were all overt cocaine addicts, thats part of why the hours are so long.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7828946/

Jesus man. I understand that degenerate behavior is common in today's doctors. That was my entire point of the original post. Otherwise what would I really be saying? That I knew ONE almost drug addict doctor that looks forward to her next festival? Obviously one of everything exists.

My point about celebrities and rich famous people was that they normalized it, to the point that you aren't even surprised doctors are druggies in their free time.

No one cars that some Uber programmer is on speed. More people would care to know that their doctor that recommends heart pressure medication is a druggy, because they'd know this personal doesn't really care about potential kidney damage in themselves, so of course they'll recommend you take kidney damaging heart medication without really explaining that that's what is happening.

If you left the SV and internet bubble, you'd learn that drug use and alcohol use is not liked by most in their higher level professionals.

This sounds more like you are bitter about an ex than anything else.

I see doctors a bit like car mechanics. While car engineers would probably more be something like biologists.

Women in particular get a lot of 'mental' diagnoses for actual physical ailments. Endometriosis seems to be one of those terrible things that women are told to suffer with, then later if they have exploratory surgery they find terrible lesions inside their body.

Is she vaccinated with mRNA?

She is now, but was infected with the virus before she got the vaccine. The vaccine was available but unfortunately she was hesitant about getting it due to all of the noise online and in the news. She was vaccinated about 4mo after being infected and had already been experiencing Long Covid symptoms.

If she was vaccinated after infection, she probably has enough level of antibodies. (1,2) I hope she consult that with her doctor rather than online noise as you think.

(1) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.04.21267114v... (2) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.12.21263461v...

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