Hello! This is just a brief note to explain why there are suddenly some blog posts here that predate the founding of Lost Coast Advocacy.

How can doctors miss a diagnosis for 7 years?

For this post, I thought I’d share a discussion I had with my partner this month about an ad we kept seeing on our Roku channel. (We’ve been watching Bones reruns. #notanad)
The advertisement features a woman discussing a possible patient experience with hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) and promotes an “awareness” website that is actually run by Novartis who makes a medication which may treat HS (see last paragraph for more info).
The woman in the ad says she had painful bumps under her arms that prevented her from wearing a seatbelt tolerably. She says that doctors didn’t know what these bumps were for 7 years.

My personal story of negotiating an expensive hospital bill over a Covid test.

Residency Sucks: But does it suck enough to leave?

If you are currently in a medical residency program, I suspect you may have considered quitting at some point. To be honest, there are very few (none?) jobs that require 4 years of grueling post-graduate level training and make you work 60-100 hours/week for <60k annually. Residency training is highly likely to make logical people re-evaluate their decision to enter or continue with it, in my opinion.