Misdiagnosis of Juvenile Diabetes Type 1
Friends of ours just discovered their 6 year old son has Juvenile Diabetes. The look of pain on Mom and Dad’s face is transparent as Jordon takes his shot, but being the little trooper he is, Jordon tells them not to worry “Don’t worry, I’ll get used to it”?.
The day before entering the hospital, Jordon was urinating every 30 minutes which clued the parents in that something was not right. His blood sugar level was at 497 and he was immediately referred to another hospital more equipped to deal with this form of Diabetes.
Diabetes Misdiagnoses
What is odd is that Jordon went in for a test a few months before and everything checked out fine. Now, he’s diagnosed with Juvenile Diabetes. More odd, was that the doctor specializing in this field asked if Jordon had any recent significant events, such as surgery.
Jordon did in fact have surgery to have tubes placed in his ears a month or so before. Upon hearing this, the doctor seemed concerned and said “He Did?” it’s not much, but the expression on the doctor’s face and the way the question was asked hinted that the doctor knew something. Nothing else was mentioned and the doctor continued the consultation.
Perhaps the doctor knew something or has seen enough to make a conclusion, but in the medical industry, and for legal purposes, you just don’t mention a hypothesis without factual information, so I’m guessing.
I’ve seen misdiagnoses many times; let me quickly tell you about two serious errors. I had a lump on my tongue which doctors lopped off, tested and diagnosed with cancer. A throat specialist was smart enough to suspect that I had Mono and retested (at 38, it’s rare and can mimic cancer); Mono it was, no cancer and the lump was simply a swollen glad brought on by Mono. Without the retest, I can only imagine what would have happened!
While living in Florida (we are originally from and now living in Michigan) my wife was diagnosed with a hyperthyroid (an overactive thyroid gland that causes excessive sweating, tremors, heart problems, etc). The doctors wanted to use radioactive Iodine to kill part of the thyroid to bring it back down to normal levels.
Luckily, we never had the procedure and moved back to Michigan shortly after. It was a misdiagnoses and within two months, her thyroid went back to normal! Turns out it was the climate, but the doctors never suggested this (or perhaps didn’t know about it). Had she killed part of the thyroid, she would now have the opposite problem, a hypothyroid!
Cure for Juvenile Diabetes
The point is that there may be an underlying cause to some cases of Juvenile Diabetes that the doctor may not be aware of or can’t legally say. If we can find a pattern, we can hone in on the cause and hopefully, find a less invasive (or natural) treatment.
Perhaps when the body is traumatized, such as surgery for ear tubes, it somehow causes something in the body to produce more sugar. Doctors are not even sure what causes diabetes, but perhaps the information found here may help Jordon or others in some way.As it stands, Jordon’s life has changed, forever.
How you can Help
Perhaps you, your child or someone you know has also had surgery or trauma of some type before being diagnosed with Juvenile or Type 1 Diabetes? If you have any information whatsoever that may help, please leave a comment. You do not have to use your real name.
Disclaimer: I am in no way suggesting that you not seek medical advice or avoid treatment but rather looking for ideas, suggestions and creative thought.
Written by Jim on April 16th, 2005 with
5 comments.
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Vaccines are not mandatory in many states and we need to seriously question the increasing number of vaccines for our children (a total of 48 by age 6).
People do have vaccine reactions and maybe there could be something related to that? Was the child vaccinated close to the time he was diagnosed with diabetes?
There are far fewer misdiganosis than you think. “Misdiagnosis” are created becuase they are extremely profitable; they create business where there was none. There was a surgeon on 20/20 who was putting stents in people who had no illnes at all. Referring to one of the stories above, I don’t believe for a second that in the 21st century medical labs can’t tell the difference between mono cells and cancer cells, but cancer treatment is very profitable and the more misdiagnosis of cancer the more profit. How many people have been told they beat cancer after having medical therapy of some sort when in actuality they never had cancer to begin with? I bet it’s much higher than anyone would believe.
Greedy doctors and hospitals are not isolated incidences, they are rampant.
Roger
It’s true that misdiagnoses are incredibly profitable, not only to the health care industry but to the patients when found out. I just don’t see doctors not saying anything to increase money to a harvest they won’t reap. Physicians’ reputations are on the line.
That being said, I agree 100 percent that many physicians jump to conclusions or to diagnoses all too quickly. Patients demand quick answers and turn-around-times, but physicians should not.
Mono is very very difficult to diagnose, as it’s in the same family as herpes viruses, and is very difficult to distinguish from epstein-barr virus, for example. I have a recurring problem with oral herpes that has grown from a very infrequent problem on my lip to be something that involves the glands in my neck, which hurt terribly, and often send my white count into the area of “uh-oh, could be cancer, we better make sure”. No one is misdiagnosing me, they are making sure that the old diagnosis is still the right diagnosis. I can’t complain about that.
I have also been recently diagnosed as having diabetes incipidus… it’s water diabetes, not sugar diabetes, although it shows many similar symptoms to the sugar kind. I’m sure glad they took their time testing me to find out which one it was.
I would just suggest that GPs send their patients to well known specialists for as much testing and confirmation as possible.
I am a medical student and I hope I might be able to give you some idea of what might be going on, bearing in mind that nothing I say should be taken as definitive medical advice– please do consult a physician before making any sort of decision based on what loons on the internet (myself included) have to say.
First off, I take offense to the other commenters’ cynical suggestions that doctors routinely trump up nonexistent illnesses to treat invasively for money. There are always bad seeds, and medicine is a profession where you have tremendous power to harm people– but by and large, I can assure you that doctors are just regular people like you, trying to do a good job. Like you, they occasionally make mistakes. And also like you, I presume, they want to make money to support themselves and their families– but not by harming you with painful, invasive, unnecessary treatment.
To the original author: I am very sorry to hear that your son developed diabetes, and I wish all of you the best. I can say, straightaway, however, that Type I diabetes is an autoimmune disease. It occurs when your immune cells (for a variety of reasons) “recognize” the insulin-secreting cells of the pancreas as foreign and attack them. There is no known mechanism that could associate surgery (other than, say, organ transplant) with autoimmunity of any kind.
The doctor you spoke to was most likely just trying to take a thorough and accurate history, but he may have been wondering whether your son had abdominal surgery that might have injured his pancreas. It is very unlikely that such an injury would present with diabetes alone, or with diabetes at all, because of the way the insulin-secreting cells are dotted across the pancreas– but it is a theoretical possibility.
In thinking about a patient’s problem doctors try to consider as many possibilities as they can, even if they ultimately go on to treat the most likely one (or to order further tests.) Abdominal surgery, could, in theory, cause diabetes (this would not actually be type I diabetes, since it is not autoimmune.) Surgery in the Eustachian tubes (which I had myself when I was very young because of recurrent ear infections) could NOT disrupt the pancreas, since the pancreas is in the abdomen and the eustachian tubes are in the skull.
The pensive expression you saw was most likely the doctor thinking about the detail you told him about the surgery and double-checking in his mind to make sure that it did not fit– and also that it would not complicate the treatment of your son’s diabetes. Doctors do this kind of double-checking all the time, since medicine is an enormous field, and if you do not stop and reconsider, it would be easy to miss something. He would be stupid to hide anything from you in this situation, as there is nothing to hide.
Regarding your misdiagnoses, the commenter above me rightly pointed out that mononucleosis is very difficult to differentiate from lymphoma, and that it is very important to get good samples reviewed by a skilled pathologist. No doctor wants to miss a case of lymphoma, for reasons that I hope are obvious. Your instinct was absolutely right– seeking a second opinion from a specialist was appropriate; I would have hoped, however, that your first doctor would have tried to confirm the diagnoses more definitively (or referred you to another physician) before, say, starting you on chemotherapy.
As for your wife’s thyroid incident, this was not a misdiagnosis per se. Thyroid disorders are quite tricky, and can arise and disappear mysteriously. I am not a physician, but I do believe that caution is important. In general, unless the doctor suspects cancer (and I presume he did the necessary tests to rule it out), hyperthyroidism is rarely an immediate emergency and can be watched.
Sometimes it does go away; more commonly, it does not. Recommending immediate radioiodine treatment may have been on the hastier side, but it does not make it the wrong decision; ultimately, as I’m sure you know, the decision is yours. The doctor’s recommendation is just that, a recommendation.
To the commenter on vaccines: it is true that there are some tenuous but possible links between vaccinations and autoimmune diseases (note that Type I diabetes is *not* one of the autoimmune disease on this list– studies have consistently failed to establish any kind of link.)[1]
Your comment comes appallingly close to suggesting that parents should not vaccinate their children, or that vaccines are some sort of money-making scam. Vaccines are, in fact, largely unprofitable for doctors and drug companies and developed with a great deal of government funding because the evil medical conspiracy wants to control your life by preventing you from dying of measles, mumps, whooping cough, diphtheria, hepatitis B, or polio– those vicious money-grubbing pigs.
References:
1.Schattner, A. “Consequence or coincidence? The occurrence, pathogenesis and significance of autoimmune manifestations after viral vaccines.” _Vaccine_, Jun 10;23(30):3876-86. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.ezproxy.galter.northwestern.edu/pubmed/15917108?ordinalpos=6&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum