QUOTE(Newsfeed @ Fri 1st April 2011, 8:43am)
Wikipedia helps UK student diagnose his rare heart illnessTruthDiveLondon, April 1 (ANI): A UK student, who was fobbed off by 10 doctors, has finally diagnosed his rare heart illness himself – thanks to Wikipedia. Edward Green, 26, spent eight years being told his symptoms were harmless even though he was once rushed
...View the article I wonder how much truth there is to this story? Any patient who complains of a rapid heart rate when standing, but not lying down, would be routinely subjected to orthostatic vital sign testing by any doctor. If it proves to be so, and it lasts and does not go away while the patient remains upright, that patient needs referral for work-up. If 10 doctors in the UK really failed to do this, as the paper reports (and who knows if the paper has it right), it's a reflection on the badness of tne National Health Service (NHS), not the goodness of Wikipedia's medical information (though I know there are doctors on Wikipedia laboring to keep the thing from killing anybody).
This is very straightforward "diagnosis" although the treatment is not (since it's exactly the same thing that happens to bed-bound people in artificially studies of "weightlessness" conducted on Earth). Perhaps the man's doctors decided he was a flake who stayed in bed too much, a little like the family in the original Willy Wonka film-- remember what happened when they got up. But even if so, the problem still needs physical therapy and needs to be addressed. If the physical therapy doesn't work, then other therapies need to be applied. You can't just tell somebody whose heart chronically races when they stand, that there's nothing wrong with them. By definition, there is.
Addendum: it's also possible that Mr. Green was initially diagnosed as merely having Jewish Anxiety Syndrome. This is not well described in the
New England Journal of Medicine nor
The Lancet, but (even if they don't watch Woody Allen films) I'm sure it is not unfamiliar to the NHS.