How Long For Diagnosis?

[Guest Viola]

I'm not sure how it works in the U.S., but here in Canada you would think that the government would want celiac disease tested for right away. It took over 20 years of doctor appointments, hospital visits etc. before I was diagnosed, and here health care is paid by taxes. Early diagnosis of celiac disease would save a lot of tax money!

[ianm]

In the US you keep going to the doctor until your insurance company drops you for excessive usage. However they won't pay for you to see a nutritionist or homeopath who may actually solve the problem. Then you are forced to only go to emergency rooms which are more expensive and are required by law to treat you regardless if you have insurance or not. Since you can't pay the bill the hospitals and insurance companies charge even more to recover their costs. Then you can get Medicaid which about 90% of the tax dollars go to supporting a bureacracy and not to health care. It just seems to me that if everyone focused on proper nutrition that at least half of what we spend on health care could be spent on something else. Maybe we could afford to invade another oil rich Middle Eastern country.

Wait there is someone knocking on my door, oh no it's the goons from ConAgra and Pfizer coming to take me away!

[Guest Viola]

Ianm, I hope those goons didn't take you away, we don't want to loose you

[mytummyhurts]

I'm becoming really disappointed in our doctors and their schooling. Insurance companies too. It's all about the profits now. That's probably why they don't do the test on everyone, the insurance companies probably don't want to pay for it, even if it's cheap. But even if it only costs them $20, $20 multiplied by millions is a lot. And they do need to stay in business.

[Guest ajlauer]

I'll never forget when the docoor told me I had it, that he didn't know much about it and that in a year I would know more about it than he did. When I saw him about a month ago he said he had just given a talk on it to other doctors. I sure hope he learned a lot in the meantime!

You gotta give that doctor credit. I've never had one admit that they didn't know something!! It's usually an attitude of, "If I didn't learn it in medical school, it doesn't exist, and you're crazy!" I would think that if the doctor was decent enough to admit an ignorance.... he probably did do some research on celiac disease when he got home that night.

[Guest nini]

I had been sick all my life. My mom said that as an infant I had projectile vomiting, couldn't tolerate breast milk, infant formula or even regular milk... She gave me regular milk though because at the time in the small town she was in there weren't any options. I've had chronic ailments all my life, as a teenager I was very skinny except for my bloated belly and my mom would tell me to just "suck in my stomach"

I'll be 36 in May and I didn't get diagnosed until 2 years ago, after several years of severely declining health during and after my pregnancy with my daughter. I had been going to the same medical group for almost 2 years with what they termed as "bizarre" symptoms and they kept sending me for test after test. Fortunately they finally sent me to a GI that recognized all of the symptoms as celiac and tested me for it right away.

I'm just thankful that we found out and also got my daughter dx, and now she won't have to go through the same health issues that I did.