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This Woman Refused to Leave the Hospital Until Doctors Properly Diagnosed Her Terrible Pelvic Pain
This article is part of Health's new series, Misdiagnosed, featuring stories from real women who have had their medical symptoms dismissed or wrongly diagnosed.
It was late 2017, and I’d been feeling under the weather for a few weeks. I was achy and tired, and I even felt dizzy and nauseous. I was definitely not pregnant, so I chalked it up to work, holiday stress, and the cold December weather in New Jersey, where I live and work as a writer and editor.
I soon started to experience a dull pain on my right side, but I wasn’t sure if it came from my groin or lower back. I checked the calendar and realized I was due for my period. PMS, I thought. My period came and went, but the pain on my right side worsened—only now, my right leg was also tingling.
I was working full-time, sitting in an uncomfortable chair for more than eight hours a day. I figured maybe the pain had something to do with all that time sitting. I started using a standing desk, but it didn’t help. Then I suspected appendicitis. Why did I think it was my appendix? Google, of course. I had the symptoms, which included sharp pain on the right side, plus nausea and stomach bloating.
One afternoon in mid-December, the pain was just unbearable. I was at work and sent a slack to my editor: My appendix burst, I think. Going to ER. Bye.
Misdiagnosed in the ER
At the emergency room, a kind nurse asked, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad is your pain?’
“It’s a 20,” I answered.
She gave me a look; I assumed she thought I was fishing for meds.
“I’m not here for drugs,” I said. “I think my appendix burst.” She got me into a bed and pulled the curtain. I folded up into the fetal position in my black jeans and black turtleneck sweater.
I’ve had some experience in hospitals. Three years earlier, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I underwent thyroid removal surgery and radiation, which necessitated multiple hospital trips for tests and doctor appointments. I was still cancer-free at my last checkup, and I didn’t think it had anything to do with the symptoms I was now experiencing.
I’m a single mom, so I called my brother and asked him to pick up my son from school. The ER doctor, a jolly, goofy guy, came in and examined me. When he pushed on the area where my appendix is, I froze with pain. He ordered blood labs, an x-ray of my pelvis, and an abdominal ultrasound.
RELATED: When I Told My Doctor I Thought I Had Endometriosis, He Said, 'Stop Practicing Google Medicine'
Hours later, the test results were in, and he diagnosed me with a benign ovarian cyst. I was discharged and told to take Motrin, use a heating pad, and follow up with my ob-gyn. An ovarian cyst was causing all that pain? And tingling in my leg? I went home skeptical. The next day, when I went to see my ob-gyn, she confirmed that I did have a small cyst on my right ovary.
When I looked up ovarian cysts later, I read that these are not uncommon in menstruating women. A cyst can form during ovulation when the follicle that’s supposed to rupture and release an egg fails to do so. Another type of cyst happens when fluid accumulates in the follicle. Both are benign cysts that tend to resolve themselves. Yet sometimes they cause pain in the lower right or left side of the pelvis, according to womenshealth.gov.
I still wasn’t so sure a cyst was the root of the problem. And how did it explain the tingling and numbness in my leg? That night I took a cocktail of Tylenol and Motrin to quell the pain and tried to go to sleep.
A second trip to the hospital
I was back in the emergency room hours later because I threw up, and the pain in my right side had become excruciating. Between these two symptoms, I was confident that my appendix was the problem. I was at the same hospital, but a different ER doctor saw me this time.
“I threw up. I can’t stand up straight.”
“Are you pregnant?” the doctor asked.
At this point, I really just lost it. The pain was overwhelming. I was exhausted.
“Are you suggesting I’m someone who doesn’t know they’re pregnant until the baby is crowning? Because I’m not in labor, my friend. Do I look pregnant?” I stretched my shirt against my flat stomach.
He ordered a transvaginal ultrasound, then read the scan. “You have a cyst,” he announced. “Cysts are painful. Your appendix is absolutely fine.” He wrote me an Rx for Percocet, which took the edge off the pain, and my dad drove me home. I was exhausted and figured I’d deal with things in the morning. But even with the prescription painkiller, one symptom persisted: the numbness and tingling in my right leg.
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"You have to help me—something is very wrong"
The next morning, I couldn’t get out of bed; my right leg was numb, and the pain in my side was terrible. My dad was already on his way over to help me get my son to school. Once my son was on his way, my dad actually carried me out of bed to get me into his car and to another hospital.
When we arrived at Hackensack University Medical Center in northern New Jersey, I was unable to walk and had to use a wheelchair. The admitting nurse helped me change into a gown, and then an outrageously handsome doctor flung open the curtain and sat on the bed.
“Christine, I read the reports from the other hospital. You do have a very small cyst. I spoke to your ob-gyn—I know her—and she doesn’t think the cyst could cause this kind of pain. Talk to me.” What a relief it was to be dealing with a doctor who didn’t just order up some tests but actually spoke to me and wanted to listen.
“I want morphine and an MRI. I’m not leaving this hospital until I am properly diagnosed. I have a young son, a dog, a job, it’s Christmastime and I am in head and neck cancer remission.” I briefed him on my diagnosis with thyroid cancer in 2014, the surgeries and radiation I endured, and my regular doctor checkups.
“I have been in and out of hospitals for years and I know my body,” I explained. “I’m confident something more is wrong than a minuscule cyst.” I put my hand on the doctor’s hand. “You have to help me. Something is very wrong.”
He ordered a morphine IV drip and the MRI. He listened to me. He even let me have a cup of lemon Italian ice. An hour later he read the MRI results to me—and what he found out came as a complete surprise.
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Finally, the right diagnosis
“Christine, you have a herniated disk at L5. (L5 is a vertebra in the lower back.) It’s leaking. It is also pressing on the sciatic nerve, which is causing the extreme pain, tingling, and numbness in your leg. You need spine surgery. I’m admitting you.”
A herniated disk? Because of the cyst diagnosis, I was expecting something along those lines, like ovarian cancer. Then a lightbulb went off.
“I fell in the snow! I was playing with my son and dog! I slipped!” I blurted out to the doctor. “I landed directly on my bottom. It was a hard impact; I remember feeling a vibration. I dried off and was achy the next day but took some Tylenol,” I told my doctor.
Things fell into place now. According to Mayo Clinic, a herniated disk occurs when something happens to one of the rubbery cushions (or discs) between the vertebrae that make up the spine. If one of the discs gets a tear because of an injury, the soft cushioning inside can start to leak out. This irritates nearby nerves and muscles, causing pain, numbness, or weakness. In my case, the disc was irritating the sciatic nerve, which runs from the lower back through the hips and butt and down both legs.
McDreamy clarified that adults get herniated disks for a few reasons: genetic predisposition, occupational hazards, excess weight, or like me, blunt force trauma—that fall in the snow.
RELATED: A Nurse Explains the Scientific Reason You Believe Everything Your Doctor Says
Undergoing spinal surgery
I chose to have my disc surgery at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, and the operation happened two days later. I had a microdiscectomy, a technique that uses small tools to create a small incision. A microscope allows the surgeon to see the disc before operating. I needed only a small sliver of my disc removed—the part that was pressing on the sciatic nerve, triggering the radiating pain.
I stayed in the hospital overnight, then went on disability for eight weeks and attended physical therapy to strengthen my left and right sides. (Turns out I was putting all of my weight on my left side for a long time, without even realizing it, to relieve the pain on my right side caused by the herniated disc.) And that ovarian cyst? It eventually dissolved.
No more pain—but some words of advice
It’s been more than a year since I received the correct diagnosis for my pain and had surgery to relieve it. I came away with some insight: If I hadn’t advocated for myself, demanded that MRI, and didn’t get angry and insistent that a cyst was not at the root of my pain, I’d still be suffering. It would also have delayed getting the right diagnosis, and my disc surgery would have been riskier.
So I’m glad I insisted on going back to the hospital until I was taken seriously, and then persisted until I found a doctor who listened to me. I’m now pain-free and back to my regular life. Listening to what my gut told me made all the difference.
If you have a story to share about being misdiagnosed, email us at misdiagnosed@health.com and join our Misdiagnosed Facebook community to talk to women who share the same struggle.
Teenager with Tourette Syndrome Says She Was Asked to Leave Theater Before Start of Avengers
When 15-year-old Emily Womack visited her local AMC theater to finally catch Avengers: Endgame on opening night, she never imagined she would leave before the action even began.
Emily has Tourette syndrome, a neurodevelopment disorder that causes uncontrolled repetitive movements or vocal tics, and has coped all her life with the rude reactions she receives when out in public. For Emily, these tics typically come out as involuntary screams and movements in her arms and legs, or she’ll feel compelled to throw an object across the room.
But Emily does have a way to temporarily suppress her tics if she “releases” them repeatedly for a short period of time. Doing so will spare her enough time to hold them back — just long enough to watch a movie — and that’s what she did just after she and her family took their seats at the AMC theater near their home in Dray, Oklahoma, last Thursday.
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Though they arrived 45 minutes before the movie’s start to give Emily enough time to let out her tics, the family was approached by a manager and asked to step outside.
“He told me that nine people complained about Emily making noises, and I explained to him that that’s not a problem, that she won’t be doing it during the movie,” Emily’s mother Tina, 47, tells to PEOPLE. “He said there were so many complaints that it would be best if we left, and that he can’t tell me to leave, but that’s what would be best.”
The stress of the situation caused Emily’s tics to worsen, Tina explains, and at that point, the family felt it would be impossible to sit through the movie without disruption.
“There was no way she was going to be able to suppress it,” she recalls. “Yeah, being asked to leave? It upset her. She felt judged, but she also felt like she was harming people or ruining their experience, which is what kills me.”
RELATED: The 2 Major Types of OCD—and How to Recognize Them
For their trouble, the family was given movie passes and coupons for popcorn and soda. The theater later refunded the family for the price of their Avengers tickets and invited Emily to her own private screening of the movie.
Emily declined the private showing and the family instead bought tickets for a screening at a drive-in theater this Thursday night. But because so many days had passed from opening night, Emily, unfortunately, had the ending of the movie spoiled for her.
In a statement, AMC tells PEOPLE that they strive to ensure patrons “can enjoy the moviegoing experience,” but they do not “permit disruptive noises during the movie.”
“In this case, the theater team attempted to resolve this situation without anyone having to leave the movie,” an AMC spokesperson said. “A theater manager, in response to multiple noise complaints during the trailers before Avengers: Endgame, verified the disruptive noise and discussed the situation with the family, explaining that disruptions are not permitted during the movie.”
“The family was offered options in an attempt to resolve the issue, including the opportunity to see the movie at a less crowded showtime, but in no way did AMC ‘kick out’ the guest or family, nor was anyone made to leave,” their statement continued. “The family initially chose to stay in the movie.”
The AMC spokesperson added: “Shortly after the movie started, the family chose to leave. Wanting to make sure everyone feels welcome at the theatre, the manager offered multiple passes, and coupons for popcorn and soda for a return visit. We’ve also reached out to the family to discuss other options for them to come back and see the movie.”
After the incident, Emily posted a video to the Tourette Association of America’s Facebook page. Her caption included a plea for companies to participate in training that would help them understand the condition and how to best handle situations with empathy.
“I’ve constantly been looked at, people have said things to me, I’ve been called several names by adults even, mostly adults even actually,” Emily tells PEOPLE. “I feel it’s important that people understand what’s happening, that I’m not meaning to be a nuisance or harmful to anyone else.”
“It’s always affected me emotionally,” she continues. “I’ve gotten better over the years, but I know in the beginning I spent many nights crying because I didn’t understand why people didn’t accept me. But now I get they just don’t know what’s happening. They don’t understand that I can’t control what I’m doing.”
Emily’s emotional video has since received over 22,000 views, and many parents of children who have Tourette’s echoed the plea of compassion from strangers and businesses.
While Tourette’s was once thought to be rare, it’s estimated that one out of every 160 children between the ages of 5 to 17 in the United States has the disorder, according to the Tourette Association of America.
“The request to leave created an environment where Emily and her family felt they were unwelcome as a result of her disability — a disability covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act,” Amanda Talty, Tourette Association of America President and CEO tells PEOPLE. “Offering movie passes and popcorn will not erase the embarrassment and shame one feels in situations like this. Sadly, this is a story we in the Tourette Syndrome community know all too well and this moment will stay with Emily for the rest of her life.”
Emily hopes that by sharing what happened to her at the theater, many of the hundreds of thousands of people who have the condition might have more positive experiences while out in public.
“I think it’s important that we let businesses and people know what is happening, so they’re educated,” Emily says, “and they can think about it first before judging too quickly.”
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Merging cell datasets, panorama style
A new algorithm developed by MIT researchers takes cues from panoramic photography to merge massive, diverse cell datasets into a single source that can be used for medical and biological studies.
Single-cell datasets profile the gene expressions of human cells — such as a neurons, muscles, and immune cells — to gain insight into human health and treating disease. Datasets are produced by a range of labs and technologies, and contain extremely diverse cell types. Combining these datasets into a single data pool could open up new research possibilities, but that’s difficult to do effectively and efficiently.
Traditional methods tend to cluster cells together based on nonbiological patterns — such as by lab or technologies used — or accidentally merge dissimilar cells that appear the same. Methods that correct these mistakes don’t scale well to large datasets, and require all merged datasets share at least one common cell type.
In a paper published today in Nature Biotechnology, the MIT researchers describe an algorithm that can efficiently merge more than 20 datasets of vastly differing cell types into a larger “panorama.” The algorithm, called “Scanorama,” automatically finds and stitches together shared cell types between two datasets — like combining overlapping pixels in images to generate a panoramic photo.
As long as any other dataset shares one cell type with any one dataset in the final panorama, it can also be merged. But all of the datasets don’t need to have a cell type in common. The algorithm preserves all cell types specific to every dataset.
“Traditional methods force cells to align, regardless of what the cell types are. They create a blob with no structure, and you lose all interesting biological differences,” says Brian Hie, a PhD student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and a researcher in the Computation and Biology group. “You can give Scanorama datasets that shouldn’t align together, and the algorithm will separate the datasets according to biological differences.”
In their paper, the researchers successfully merged more than 100,000 cells from 26 different datasets containing a wide range of human cells, creating a single, diverse source of data. With traditional methods, that would take roughly a day’s worth of computation, but Scanorama completed the task in about 30 minutes. The researchers say the work represents the highest number of datasets ever merged together.
Joining Hie on the paper are: Bonnie Berger, the Simons Professor of Mathematics at MIT, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and head of the Computation and Biology group; and Bryan Bryson, an MIT assistant professor of biological engineering.
Linking “mutual neighbors”
Humans have hundreds of categories and subcategories of cells, and each cell expresses a diverse set of genes. Techniques such as RNA sequencing capture that information in sprawling multidimensional space. Cells are points scattered around the space, and each dimension corresponds to the expression of a different gene.
Scanorama runs a modified computer-vision algorithm, called “mutual nearest neighbors matching,” which finds the closest (most similar) points in two computational spaces. Developed at CSAIL, the algorithm was initially used to find pixels with matching features — such as color levels — in dissimilar photos. That could help computers match a patch of pixels representing an object in one image to the same patch of pixels in another image where the object’s position has been drastically altered. It could also be used for stitching vastly different images together in a panorama.
The researchers repurposed the algorithm to find cells with overlapping gene expression — instead of overlapping pixel features — and in multiple datasets instead of two. The level of gene expression in a cell determines its function and, in turn, its location in the computational space. If stacked on top of one another, cells with similar gene expression, even if they’re from different datasets, will be roughly in the same locations.
For each dataset, Scanorama first links each cell in one dataset to its closest neighbor among all datasets, meaning they’ll most likely share similar locations. But the algorithm only retains links where cells in both datasets are each other’s nearest neighbor — a mutual link. For instance, if Cell A’s nearest neighbor is Cell B, and Cell B’s is Cell A, it’s a keeper. If, however, Cell B’s nearest neighbor is a separate Cell C, then the link between Cell A and B will be discarded.
Keeping mutual links increases the likelihood that the cells are, in fact, the same cell types. Breaking the nonmutual links, on the other hand, prevents cell types specific to each dataset from merging with incorrect cell types. Once all mutual links are found, the algorithm stitches all dataset sequences together. In doing so, it combines the same cell types but keeps cell types unique to any datasets separated from the merged cells. “The mutual links form anchors that enable [correct] cell alignment across datasets,” Berger says.
Shrinking data, scaling up
To ensure Scanorama scales to large datasets, the researchers incorporated two optimization techniques. The first reduces the dataset dimensionality. Each cell in a dataset could potentially have up to 20,000 gene expression measurements and as many dimensions. The researchers leveraged a mathematical technique that summarizes high-dimensional data matrices with a small number of features while retaining vital information. Basically, this led to a 100-fold reduction in the dimensions.
They also used a popular hashing technique to find nearest mutual neighbors more quickly. Traditionally, computing on even the reduced samples would take hours. But the hashing technique basically creates buckets of nearest neighbors by their highest probabilities. The algorithm need only search the highest probability buckets to find mutual links, which reduces the search space and makes the process far less computationally intensive.
In separate work, the researchers combined Scanorama with another technique they developed that generates comprehensive samples — or “sketches” — of massive cell datasets that reduced the time of combining more than 500,000 cells from two hours down to eight minutes. To do so, they generated the “geometric sketches,” ran Scanorama on them, and extrapolated what they learned about merging the geometric sketches to the larger datasets. This technique itself derives from compressive genomics, which was developed by Berger’s group.
“Even if you need to sketch, integrate, and reapply that information to the full datasets, it was still an order of magnitude faster than combining entire datasets,” Hie says.
Experimental device generates electricity from the coldness of the universe
The obvious drawback of solar panels is that they require sunlight to generate electricity. Some have observed that for a device on Earth facing space, which has a frigid temperature, the chilling outflow of energy from the device can be harvested using the same kind of optoelectronic physics we have used to harness solar energy. New work, in a recent issue of Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing, looks to provide a potential path to generating electricity like solar cells but that can power electronics at night.
An international team of scientists has demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to generate a measurable amount of electricity in a diode directly from the coldness of the universe. The infrared semiconductor device faces the sky and uses the temperature difference between Earth and space to produce the electricity.
“The vastness of the universe is a thermodynamic resource,” said Shanhui Fan, an author on the paper. “In terms of optoelectronic physics, there is really this very beautiful symmetry between harvesting incoming radiation and harvesting outgoing radiation.”
In contrast to leveraging incoming energy as a normal solar cell would, the negative illumination effect allows electrical energy to be harvested as heat leaves a surface. Today’s technology, though, does not capture energy over these negative temperature differences as efficiently.
By pointing their device toward space, whose temperature approaches mere degrees from absolute zero, the group was able to find a great enough temperature difference to generate power through an early design.
“The amount of power that we can generate with this experiment, at the moment, is far below what the theoretical limit is,” said Masashi Ono, another author on the paper.
The group found that their negative illumination diode generated about 64 nanowatts per square meter, a tiny amount of electricity, but an important proof of concept, that the authors can improve on by enhancing the quantum optoelectronic properties of the materials they use.
Calculations made after the diode created electricity showed that, when atmospheric effects are taken into consideration, the current device can theoretically generate almost 4 watts per square meter, roughly one million times what the group’s device generated and enough to help power machinery that is required to run at night.
By comparison, today’s solar panels generate 100 to 200 watts per square meter.
While the results show promise for ground-based devices directed to the sky, Fan said the same principle could be used to recover waste heat from machines. For now, he and his group are focusing on improving their device’s performance.
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Materials provided by American Institute of Physics. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
A brain region for Pokémon characters?
If your childhood involved countless hours spent capturing, training and battling Pokémon, there may be a wrinkle in your brain that is fond of images of Wobbuffet, Bulbasaur and Pikachu.
Stanford psychologists have identified preferential activation to Pokémon characters in the brains of people who played Pokémon videogames extensively as kids.
The findings, published online in the journal Nature Human Behavior, help shed light on two related mysteries about our visual system. “It’s been an open question in the field why we have brain regions that respond to words and faces but not to, say, cars,” said study first author and former Stanford graduate student Jesse Gomez. “It’s also been a mystery why they appear in the same place in everyone’s brain.”
A partial answer comes from recent studies in monkeys at Harvard Medical School. Researchers there found that in order for regions dedicated to a new category of objects to develop in the visual cortex — the part of the brain that processes what we see — then exposure to those objects must start young when the brain is particularly malleable and sensitive to visual experience.
While wondering if there was a way to test whether this was also true in humans, Gomez recalled his own childhood and the countless hours he spent playing videogames, and one game in particular: Pokémon Red and Blue.
“I played it nonstop starting around age 6 or 7,” Gomez said. “I kept playing throughout my childhood as Nintendo kept coming out with new versions.”
Gomez reasoned that if early childhood exposure is critical for developing dedicated brain regions, then his brain — and those of other adults who played Pokémon as kids — should respond more to Pokémon characters than other kinds of stimuli. And since the Pokémon characters from the games look very different from objects we typically encounter in our daily experience, visual theories make unique predictions about where activations to Pokémon should appear.
“What was unique about Pokémon is that there are hundreds of characters, and you have to know everything about them in order to play the game successfully. The game rewards you for individuating hundreds of these little, similar-looking characters,” Gomez said. “I figured, ‘If you don’t get a region for that, then it’s never going to happen.”’
Eccentricity bias
Excited, Gomez proposed the idea to his adviser. “I thought, ‘This is never going to work,'” said Kalanit Grill-Spector, a professor of psychology in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences.
The more they considered, however, the more they realized they had all of the ingredients of a really good natural experiment on their hands: The first Pokémon game was released in 1996 and played by children as young as 5 years old, many of whom continued to play later versions of the game well into their teens and even early adulthood. The games not only exposed these children to the same characters over and over again, it rewarded them when they won a Pokémon battle or added a new character to the in-game encyclopedia called the Pokédex. Furthermore, every child played the games on the same handheld device — the Nintendo Game Boy — which had the same small square screen and required them to hold the devices at roughly the same arm’s length.
This last point, the Stanford researchers realized, could be used to test a visual theory called eccentricity bias, which states that the size and location of a dedicated category region in the brain depends on two things: how much of our visual field the objects take up, and also which parts of our vision — central or peripheral — we use to view them.
Playing Pokémon on a tiny screen means that the Pokémon characters only take up a very small part of the player’s center of view. The eccentricity bias theory thus predicts that preferential brain activations for Pokémon should be found in the part of the visual cortex that processes objects in our central, or foveal, vision.
Seed funding
Despite her skepticism, Grill-Spector suggested Gomez apply for seed funding available through Stanford’s Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging to begin his experiment. “This is what seed grants are for,” Grill-Spector said. “They allow us to take chances on risky experiments that could answer really deep, insightful questions.”
Once funded, Gomez recruited adults who had played Pokémon extensively as children. He found 11, including himself and Michael Barnett, the lab manager at the time and a co-author on the study.
When the test subjects were placed inside a functional MRI scanner and shown hundreds of random Pokémon characters, their brains responded more to the images compared to a control group who had not played the videogame as children.
“I initially used the Pokémon characters from the Game Boy game in the main study, but later I also used characters from the cartoon in a few subjects,” Gomez said. “Even though the cartoon characters were less pixelated, they still activated the brain region.”
The site of the brain activations for Pokémon was also consistent across individuals. It was located in the same anatomical structure – a brain fold located just behind our ears called the occipitotemporal sulcus. As best the researchers can tell, this region typically responds to images of animals (which Pokémon characters resemble).
“I think one of the lessons from our study is that these brain regions that are activated by our central vision are particularly malleable to extensive experience,” Grill-Spector said.
Master improviser
The new findings are just the latest evidence that our brains are capable of changing in response to experiential learning from a very early age, Grill-Spector said, but that there are underlying constraints hardwired into the brain that shape and guide how those changes unfold.
Like a skilled jazz player who spontaneously invents fresh melodies while still respecting the grammar of music, the brain is a master improviser that can create new activations devoted to Pokémon characters, but it must still follow certain rules — like those regarding objects preferentially viewed with our central gaze — about where these category-preferring activations can take place.
For parents who might look to the study as proof that videogames can leave a lasting effect on the brains of impressionable children, Grill-Spector said that our brains are capable of containing multitudes. “The visual cortex is made up of hundreds of millions of neurons,” she said. “We have the capacity to encode many, many patterns in that stretch of cortex.”
Gomez also noted that all of the Pokémon-playing test subjects grew up to be successful adults. “I would say to those parents that the people who were scanned here all have their PhDs,” Gomez said. “They’re all doing very well.”
Health24.com | Medical marijuana use rising among cancer patients
Americans with cancer are more likely to use marijuana and prescription opioids than those without cancer, and the use of medical marijuana by this group is on the rise, new research shows.
Pain is common among cancer patients, but many do not get adequate pain relief, the researchers noted.
Legislative changes
The new study looked at more than 800 adults with cancer who took part in the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey between 2005 and 2014. The patients were compared with about 1 650 adults without cancer.
The findings showed that 40% of the cancer patients had used marijuana within the past year, compared with 38% of those without cancer.
People with cancer were also more likely to use prescription opioids than those without the disease – nearly 14% versus just over 6%, respectively.
When analysing rates of marijuana and opioid use among more than 19 000 survey respondents, including those with and without cancer, the investigators found increasing rates of marijuana use over the 10-year study period, probably because legislative changes increased its availability.
Drop in hospitalisations
More clinical trials are needed to asses just how effective medical marijuana is against cancer-related pain, said co-lead author Dr Kathryn Ries Tringale, of the University of California, San Diego.
Prescription opioid use remained stable among cancer patients, the study authors said.
A cancer diagnosis did not significantly affect the odds of substance abuse between 2005 and 2014, according to the study published online in the journal Cancer.
Study co-author Dr Jona Hattangadi-Gluth, noted that legalisation of medical marijuana has been associated with a drop in hospitalisations for opioid abuse or dependence. If patients are substituting marijuana for opioids, it may be an opportunity for reducing opioid-related illness and death, she suggested.
“Of course, it will also be important to identify risks and adverse effects of marijuana, which has not previously been studied on large randomized clinical trials, given its scheduling as a class 1 controlled substance,” Hattangadi-Gluth said in a journal news release.
Image credit: iStock
Health24.com | WATCH: Is living in a city bad for your health? An expert cautions on ‘city stress’
Dr Carsten Lekutat talks to renowned psychiatrist and stress researcher Dr Mazda Adli about the physical and psychological impact of city life. They also look into ways of finding peace and tranquility within urban surroundings.
Image credit: Deutsche Welle
Health24.com | Man suffers stroke after stretching his neck
After reading his story, you might want to think twice before you get down to some neck-cracking.
An 28-year-old man wanted to relieve the tension in his neck, instead he landed in hospital after suffering a stroke and torn artery.
According to NBC News, Josh Hader was working from home on 14 March when he rolled his neck to the right to relieve pain he’d experienced for several weeks.
“I used my hand to apply a bit more pressure… and then I heard a pop sound,” the father-of-two told NBC News. “Then everything on my left side started to go numb.”
His first thought was that it could be a stroke, but since his face wasn’t drooping on one side – a common sign of a stroke – he was relieved.
However, when he walked to the fridge to get an ice pack he lost his balance, People writes.
“I was tripping over myself trying to walk straight,” Josh, who’s from Guthrie in Oklahoma, said. “It was actually impressive that I couldn’t walk straight whatsoever.”
His father-in-law rushed him to hospital, where a CT scan showed he’d suffered a stroke caused by a blood clot.
“I remember hearing a doctor at the ER yelling out to staff, ‘We have 12 minutes to administer this.’
“That’s when everything kind of landed home.”
Later Josh was transferred to Oklahoma City’s Mercy Hospital, where he was told he’d suffered an ischemic stroke, which occurs when the arteries to the brain become narrowed or blocked, causing severely reduced blood flow.
The former police officer’s clot was caused by a small tear in a vertebral artery. Doctors told him the direct cause of the stroke was because he’d stretched his neck.
They said they saw about three or four cases of ischemic stroke a year, but mostly after car accidents or other impacts.
“I was the only self-manipulation case they’d ever seen,” Josh said. “Great way to break a record!”
Sources: People, NBC News, Popsugar.com
Image credit: Supplied
