There's a time and place to ask questions. Challenging physicians on their knowledge of medicine is being presumptuous to say the least. This is just an anonymous website so what you say here nobody cares. But if you do this in PA school or when you work as one, you'll run into a lot of trouble. I know of one fellow med student who almost got booted out of school because he didn't know when to let things go. I know you're older, but you won't get any more slack than the 22 year old.
I agree with your point, though I would frame it like this:
Any monkey can flip through the interweb and come up with some random, rare diagnosis that most physicians have never heard of. Heck, patients do this crap all the time, especially the chronic pain patients.
Pt: "Doctor, I was wondering if you thought my low back pain could mean I have Bingham's Syndrome?"
MD: "I'm not familiar with that syndrome. Where did you hear about it?"
Pt: "Never heard of Bingham's Syndrome?! Clearly you are not a very good doctor!"
What makes us physicians is not our knowledge of disease, but the recognition of patterns of health and disease. We understand (or, to be more accurate, are in the process of learning to understand) the process by which medical problems are evaluated, diagnosed, and treated. We simultaneously consider not only what things
could be, but also what they are
likely to be. This process understanding is taught in formal settings, both classroom and clinical, and simply cannot be replicated by independent reading of medical texts.
And Sunfire, that's exactly what's going on here. You obviously have read a lot of medical texts. Hell, they're probably the same ones I have sitting on my shelf. But your knowledge is piecemeal, acquired through rote memorization with the benefit of context. It doesn't matter how many articles you cite, because your problem is not lack of sources, it's lack of formal education.
You're learning the words of our language and their meaning, but you don't understand the grammatical rules. You don't understand the process, so you sound ridiculous to us (Pulmonary Aneurysm? Seriously, that's really really funny). But at the same time, you don't understand that you don't understand the process, so you're confused about why everyone is laughing, since you're using the same jargon, citing the same journals, and using the same technical words as the other posters here.
Listen, I'm not going to continue pounding on you anymore after this. Someday, if you manage to get through PA school and actually practice for a couple years, you're going to look back on your posts here and be like, "I thought my chest pain could be a Pulmonary Aneurysm? Oh man, what was I thinking? I sounded so dumb."
But until then, you should probably avoid posting on medical topics.
A AMI is a AMI/ACS UNTIL it is definatively proven NOT to be a AMI/ACS...
