It's really funny when doctors and medical professionals don't like, meaningfully understand how comorbidity works. "oh, it's very unlikely someone would have all these rare conditions at once"
yeah. maybe that would be fair to say about say, discrete viruses. but about syndromes?
like. the conditions of the human body don't know that they're taxonomically discrete. they don't know that they have different names or lists of symptoms. if a human body has a consistent issue with say, its heart rhythm, or its inflammatory response, or its glandular response, or immune system
the reason that ehlers-danlos syndrome (EDS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), postural tachycardia syndrome (PoTS), IBS (irritable bowel), autism, and even shit like coeliac and PMDD or endometriosis overlap is bc like. these are largely inflammatory issues or issues with the fascia
It's not "what the fuck, how can this person have all these different things wrong with them", bc these are largely like. syndromic definitions of how x bodily issue manifests in different systems, structures, or organs of the body
many of these conditions change in definition over time
and that's bc they're studied and understood more over time where people more meaningfully understand underlying causes and issues, such as through hormone or genetic profiles, or largely like. immune response
it's also how "rare" conditions become understood as more common over time
idk like. not to be on my soap box on this specific issue but this is what happens when you don't teach medical professionals philosophy beyond the basic ethical shit. the reason philosophy is important to medical study is so you don't mistake etymological or philological issues for scientific ones
I got told by a -medical geneticist- that it was extremely unlikely for someone to have both celiac and EDS because both were so uncommon so therefore I probably didn't have both, despite clear physical evidence to the contrary. I pointed out that there's enough people out there that even with low incidence of both, even assuming there was no link, statistically there were going to be people with both just by basic probability and that 'rare' didn't mean 'doesn't happen. I also pointed out I had 2 younger half-sibs with celiac and a cousin with celiac, T1D, and EDS-h, so odds are that no it wasn't as unlikely as she thought especially given that kind of family history.....She did not in fact care for my attitude. I didn't care for her lack of understanding of her own job, so the feeling was mutual.
Lol I definitely have both.
I think many medical professionals are very narrow-focused on their specialty, forget the rest of the body exists, and don't think of it all as an entire system.
I recall reading the book A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness. It's about a nuclear worker who received a lethal dose of radiation due to a prompt-critical accident while making nuclear fuel. As the title implies, he died over the course of 83 days.
What struck me about the book was, it's pretty clear his DNA was just shredded and nothing was really replacing itself effectively. His organs and systems failed at a rate consistent with their typical cellular lives. At each step of this, they brought in specialists to manage the problem: he wasn't producing erethrocytes, they brought in hematologists. His stomach lining was breaking down, they brought in gastroenterologists, &c. Each one had this faith that if they kept him going past this crisis, his body's natural healing would take over and he would get better. But looking at his body as a whole, it was obvious from very early that was Just Not Happening. Each specialist was looking at it as "Oh no, my one part is failing, I need to get him through this and the rest of his otherwise healthy body can pull him along!" except the whole damned body was going because that's what a lethal neutron flux does. And somewhere around day 30 or so they should have said "I'm sorry, this is not going to work, we are switching to palliative care" and he could have died a week or two later, but that's not how specialists think.
The body doesn't know we've divided it up into organs and systems and specific types of cells. It's just a body and each part affects everything else.
the number of doctors and other medical professionals, including knee specialists and physical therapists, who were completely unable over the course of several years to give me any advice about a problem with one of my knees once it was determined that 'tingling and numbness' meant it was 'something with a nerve, probably getting pinched or something' was staggering.
finally i asked my neurologist, whom i had because i'd eventually gotten some weird symptoms in my neck identified as part of a pattern of chronic migraines.
she agreed it was a compressed nerve, possibly not in the knee itself but in the hip or where it runs parallel to the iliotibial band down the outside of the thigh.
regardless her recommendation was. a specific stretching exercise.
which didn't 100% erase the problem, but ameliorated it enough that it's no longer one of my major mobility concerns or sources of pain.
absolutely insane this was not on the radar for anyone who was supposed to be an expert in knees or stretching, simply because it involved Something To Do With Nerves.
Eczema, allergies, and asthma are all likely to overlap, because they're all different ways of the body overreacting to harmless substances.
Autism, ADHD, learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, and Tourette's are all neurodevelopmental conditions, and guess what? When the brain decides to develop abnormally, it doesn't look at a checklist for a specific condition and then follow the list! It just develops weird, and people label the results. Sometimes with a LOT of labels.
Generic names that cover all the possible manifestations of an issue often aren't very helpful. Because not everyone whose skin keeps trying to self-destruct ALSO stops breathing if they try to jog. Even if the "manufacturing error: air causes breathing shutdown" and the "manufacturing error: skin breaks down when in contact with necessary skin yeasts" are coming from the same source, the solutions may vary.
So breaking things up into discrete labels is helpful. But it sure would be nice if medical practitioners were TAUGHT that this was what's going on!
