How often to doctors prescribe the wrong prescription(s)?
Let’s take an example. Say you come in to see me with abdominal pain. Now the books say that by asking the right questions I can tell what the pain is, but, unfortunately, your body didn’t read the book so the same symptoms can represent something relatively mild, or something that can kill you. In this case it includes gastritis, esophagitis, perforated ulcers, gallbladder attacks, infected gall bladder, kidney stones, infected kidney, loss of circulation to the bowel, bowel obstruction, aortic aneurysm, appendicitis, gastroenteritis, dysentery, inflamed lymph nodes, cancer of any abdominal organs, pregnancy, ectopic pregnancy, PID, ovarian cysts, bleeding ovarian cysts… And the list goes on. Some of those are pretty mild, some will kill you pretty quick.Well, then we’ll just run some tests, right? Unfortunately there’s a couple of problems with that. If you can narrow the problem down, a test might determine exactly what it is. But simple tests don’t give a lot of information (is that white count up because of pain, fear, infection, leukemia, steroids, pregnancy?) and more complex tests have more problems. Like a CT scan which doses you with quite a bit of radiation that may lead to cancer later in life. Or may find coincidental problems that have to be investigated which may cause MORE complications.So, let’s say we run all the tests, do we get a clear answer? Often, no. We’ll end up with a percentage-”in this case it’s about 95% likely that your problem is caused by X). Not bad, right? Well, no, that means out of 20 people, we’re treating one who doesn’t need treatment. And maybe the treatment, like say an antibiotic, causes a C. Diff infection that kills or injures you. Heck, even for the 95 we’re treating correctly the antibiotic can kill you.So, you can see that it’s not because of laziness or stupidity that the doctor prescribes the wrong medicine (or doesn’t prescribe the right one), it’s because this is a really hard job. And someone out there is saying “so let AI do it, they’re really good at hard jobs”. Unfortunately, they ARE good at finding patterns and responding to those, they aren’t any better than people at guessing which of 4 different things could be causing a patient’s symptoms. In fact the AI project that’s supposed to be telling doctors the best chemotherapy treatment for cancer is still giving garbage answers that are far less accurate than the actual human doctors are giving.
Sharp, pressure pains in lower abdomen?
Abdominal/pelvic pain that is similar to that of period cramping may indicate a problem in a reproductive organ (like the pain around your ovaries or uterus). This includes conditions such as endometriosis (when tissue from the uterus is displaced to somewhere else like the pelvic wall or ovaries), uterine fibroids (thick bands of muscular and fibrous tissue in the uterus), ovarian cysts, ovarian cancer (rare), or pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) infection of the reproductive organs, usually from a sexually transmitted disease. If you have pain in your ovary area, you might have an ovarian cyst. I have experienced that same type of pain whenever I have had an ovarian cyst. I was also diagnosed with endometriosis last year which caused me severe pelvic pain and intense and painful period cramping. If a gynaecological reason cannot be found for the pain you are experiencing, then it could be a gastroenterology problem which could be caused by excessive gas, chronic constipation, viral gastroenteritis (stomach flu), IBS (Irritable bowel syndrome), heartburn or indigestion, gastroesophageal reflux, ulcers, cholecystitis (inflammation of the gallbladder) with or without gallstones, appendicitis (inflammation of the appendix), diverticular disease, including inflammation of small pouches that form in the large intestines (diverticulitis), bowel obstruction (in addition to pain, this causes nausea, bloating, vomiting, and inability to pass gas or stool), food allergies, food poisoning (salmonella, shigella), hernia, kidney stones, UTI’s (urinary tract infections), pancreatitis (inflammation of the pancreas) or dissecting abdominal aortic aneurysm (bleeding into the wall of the aorta). Based on your symptoms and what you wrote, I would recommend that you should see your doctor/gynaecologist, and if nothing is found that you see a gastroenterology specialist just to rule out any serious causes. Good luck :)