Wednesday, June 01, 2016

An incident to remember

This is an incident that can be termed as 'Don't trust the Doctors' or 'Conviction of Mother's intuition', 'About medical tests and their accuracy'.

This happened a week ago. Our daughter Akshara fell ill and she was having high fever for 2 days. Anitha did her online research and was suspicious that it could be viral fever or it sometimes could be due to UTI (Urinary Tract Infection) . We reached out to the doctor and she asked us to come in to do a urine test so that UTI could be ruled out. If not detected, UTI could be pretty serious damaging the kidney's. We took Akshara for the urine test and the doctor did a visual check and she felt chances of UTI are low. But we should wait for 2 days for the culture in the urine to be tested. She also said that it looked more like a viral fever and would go away in 72 hours from when it started. We were a little relieved and headed home. The fever went down after a day and Akshara was normal. But then we got a call from the nurse saying that the test for UTI came out positive and prescribed some antibiotics. We were really concerned now. Armed with her online research and her own analysis of the circumstances, Anitha wasn't convinced that it could be UTI. If the fever was related to UTI then it shouldn't have gone and the likelihood of both UTI and an unrelated fever was quite low. So she decided to take a re-test. We went in again and gave the sample again for retest. And her hypothesis turned out to be true. The test's came negative now. Apparently the bacteria is present on the skin, and unless we don't wipe the skin clean, the traces would be found in the sample.

If not for Anitha's online research we would have followed the nurse's advice and would have unnecessarily given the antibiotics to Akshara for 10 days, which would have killed some of the good bacteria too. So the bottom-line is to not to blindly follow the doctor's/nurse's advice. Considering Doing online research has both sides. You could read some scary incidents of how worse the problem could become. But you would also gain more knowledge about the symptoms, causes, likely treatments/precautions. It's better to be aware and prepared than to be ignorant and happy.

No comments: