Do-it Yourself Doctoring

These days, we're diagnosing and even treating what ails us. Proceed with caution.

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Searching for the Diagnosis

By 3 a.m., Denise Bates was so exhausted she could hardly see straight as she searched one medical website after another. But when she heard her husband, Richard, coughing in the next room, she found the energy to keep clicking on the links. Some-where in cyberspace, she thought, there must be a diagnosis that the specialists who were treating her husband had missed. "He'd been treated with two rounds of antibiotics and had every medical test from x-rays and CT scans to an open lung biopsy, but he kept getting sicker," says the 48-year-old stay-at-home mom from Hillsboro, Oregon. "I was getting really scared."

She did online searches for all of Richard's strange ailments: such severe shortness of breath that he couldn't mow the lawn or play golf with his friends; vomiting that had caused him to lose 30 pounds in three months; skin sores; cold, inflexible fingers; painfully stiff joints; and thinning of the lips.
"I tried all different combinations of these symptoms, and one disease kept popping up: scleroderma," she says. "I'd never heard of it, and when I started reading up on it, I thought, This couldn't be it. Even though the symptoms fit, it was so rare that I thought it was impossible that he had it."

Still, she printed out her findings and showed them to Richard's doctors. "One of them said that only women get that. He told me not to be such an 'Internet ranger,' and the other doctor said to leave the doctoring to him. But the more I learned about scleroderma, the more certain I was that I'd found the right disease," says Denise. She went back online to find experts on the condition, which leads to progressive hardening of the skin and connective tissues and, in some cases, damage to internal organs. While it's most likely to strike women, it can also affect men.

In November 2003, skin and blood tests at UCLA confirmed Denise's theory: Against all odds, Richard did have scleroderma. While there's no cure, he's now taking several medications to reduce his symptoms, and in May, he received a double-lung transplant and is doing well. "I'm so grateful that my wife was able to figure out what was wrong with me," says Richard.

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Finishing up our work at a trade show in San Diego, my co-worker Maureen and I decided to go sightseeing across the border in Tijuana, Mexico. While there, we went shopping and bought a few pieces of clay kitchenware. As we crossed back into the United States, a customs official asked if we had anything of value to report. "Not really," Maureen replied, digging in her bag for the bean crock she had purchased. Everyone around us froze as she continued, "I only bought a little pot."

-- Russ Tompkins