Four years to the operating table. Twenty-four hours to the answer.

Hey Reader, Dr Karl here.

Six doors, one opened.
The scanner existed the whole time.
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Six specialists saw my wife between 2008 and 2013.
Five of them referred her onward.
Not one of them ordered an image until the sixth. Here is the sequence.
A Naturopathic Doctor recommended two tests to ask her doctor for:
IGF-1 and growth hormone.
Her gynecologist orders the only the first one but not the second. The IGF-1 comes back very high at 254. She cannot interpret it, and refers on.
An endocrinologist confirms the abnormality on a second test, adds the growth hormone at 10.5. Recommends waiting to see if it gets worse.
An internist runs a general panel instead, which finds a CRP of 3.9.
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Then her right eye started to blur :
From 2009 through 2012 a retinal ophthalmologist examined her each year for three years, while her vision declined to nearly nothing.
We asked for an MRI at each visit, as did his assistant.
Each time he declined.He called the declining vision psychosomatic:
“there was something she didn’t want to see”. Seriously?
Why not rule out a tumor with an MRI or CT Scan?
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At one point she was tested for syphilis. In 2012 she finally referred to a neuron-ophthalmologist three hours away in New Haven. A CT and an MRI was immediately order. The answer came back the same day. A meningioma was growing at the base of her skull, the size of a plum, pressing on her right optic nerve and pituitary.
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Immediate referral to a neuron-surgeon.
February 2013, 12 brain surgery.

Four years and four months:
from the first abnormal lab to the operating table.
Twenty-four hours from the right appointment to the answer.
​The scanner existed the whole time, and could have been order by anyone of those doctors. It was sitting in a hospital twenty minutes away for every one of those four years.
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​What was missing was not technology and it was not money.
​It was curiosity. Every single referral looked like action. A doctor who refers has done something. It feels like progress to the patient sitting in the chair.
But it’s only if somebody at the other end owns the question, cares, and in this case nobody did and none of them ever followed up with her.
Each one did their ‘job’, and passed her to the next doctor.
She was the only person who attended all six appointments.
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She was the only one holding the whole file. ​
So are you.

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Here’s the full story:

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Dr. Karl Goldkamp
Keto Naturopath
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