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statistically every medical procedure carries a degree of risk of harm or complication
I had a tumour removed from somewhere between my kidney and my spine. They have to go in through the front to do that, which means being opened up all the way from breastbone to knob, with the cut zigzagging around your belly button. There are an awful lot of nerves in the area between belly button and knob. If they cut the wrong one you never ejaculate again.
They lift your guts out of the way and put them over there somewhere so they can carry on cutting down towards the spine. They have to handle your bowel, which it doesn't like, so it shuts down for a week. It's all so tricky and high risk that only a handful of UK surgeons do it.
I had recently had chemo, so my blood wasn't clotting very much, which meant my wound would heal very slowly, so instead of stitching it up normally they pulled the edges together to make a nice fat ridge which looked like a railway line on an embankment. The many nerve endings in the wound were going to be screaming just a bit, so they gave me an epidural for the pain. It's a big injection into your spinal nerves. After I'd been awake for a while the epidural stopped working. That happens sometimes. So I had no pain relief on all the sliced up nerves which were screaming in the railway embankment. I'm fairly sure it feels the same as having your entrails drawn when you're executed, like the end of Braveheart. I couldn't talk without causing movement of my stomach. Every few seconds I'd have a spasm of agony and then try to keep still. I was meditating to delay the spasms, so the nurses thought I was asleep. I didn't know what was happening. Maybe this was normal and I should just cope with it? Eventually I said something intelligible and the anaesthetist was summoned, but she was in the basement of another hospital where her pager had no signal. So it took 9 hours before I was given morphine. It later transpired that the tumour was dead tissue and could have safely been left inside me forever.
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nick_h.
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Ben689908
Something that harms the wellbeing of the patient instead of improving it. The act of testing contribute to anxiety, false positives lead to unnecessary stress and more testing, and statistically every medical procedure carries a degree of risk of harm or complication*. Thatโs leaving aside more complex issues like psychosomatic illnesses, disfunctional doctor-patient relationships, etc.
Basically, while the jury seems to be still out, there is some evidence showing that people are better off testing when thereโs a reason to test for something, rather than blanket testing in case something appears. ๐คทโโ๏ธ
*E.g., yours truly in the recent past. Routine blood draw at Kings College Hospital, stupid fucking phlebotomist hit a nerve, which hurt like hell and left me with reduced feeling and occasional electric shock in my dominant hand. They also didnโt lay me down or brace me when I passed out, and their manager shortly after instructed me to walk to the ER by myself when I fell to my knees saying I was going to faint onto the ceramic floor then and there.
Life pro tip: always get blood drawn from your non dominant arm.