Gaslighting in healthcare

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They might not even be doing it on purpose. They are working within a bad system and are sloppy doctors' if there is an incongruence between what you have measured at home versus their in-clinic testing.

Testing in a clinic is not the same as testing at home. It is at a completely different time/date etc.

It is well known that people get anxious when being observed by doctors. Blood pressure readings are affected by the white coat effect (higher readings at GP surgeries versus when relaxed at home). [This comment is unrelated to your glucose question, but demonstrates that home versus in-clinic testing is not comparable].

Trust yourself. Doctors are meant to listen to their patients concerns, they do not exist to tell their patients what to think.

But then how come my situation is the opposite: at the doctors I get perfectly normal results while at home I get elevated numbers? Does anxiety actually *lower* blood glucose?!

Last edited by QFT on 28 Feb 2022, 9:36 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Oh, sorry. I edited my above post to point out my line of thinking.

I don't know everything. In answer to your specific question - I do not know.

I encourage you to further research this. Your doctor might be completely wrong in their assessment of your problems.

Also during one of the trips to the doctor, I actually decided to bring meters with me. So I took glucose tolerance test. The normal fasting is below 100 and the normal 2 hour postprandial is below 140. I didn't check fasting on my meters but I checked the postprandial one. So the official postprandial that I got was 115, which is normal, while what I got on my meters were ranging between 150 and 204 (I measured multiple times) all of which is elevated as you see.

Well, there are only two likely answers to this scenario.

Either you are using low quality measuring meters, or your GP practice is using low quality measuring meters.

How much have you spent on them? Look at the specifications of your meters and then find out what your doctor is using for a meter and compare which is better.

The NHS is known for using garbage equipment in my country. Dentists were using fake equipment on the NHS for years which was exposed a few years back. They bought their equipment from China to save on the ££££'s. Bite-wing x-ray machines giving out nuclear blasts of radiation on patient jaws.

Last edited by blitzkrieg on 28 Feb 2022, 9:48 pm, edited 2 times in total.

^ I'll add to that - obviously the nuclear comparison is hyperbole, but, the strength of those Chinese x-rays was way beyond accepted guidelines.

Well, the difference between home meters and doctor meters is that

a) Home meters take blood from the finger and doctor meters from the vein

b) Home meters give me number right away, while doctor sends it to the lab and only gives me the results few days later

c) A home meter would cost 20 dollars and then the strips would cause less than a dollar per strip (but I might pay like 20 dollars or even 100 dollars since there are a lot of strips). In case of a doctor, I get a single blood test that might cost between 40 and 200 dollars. So a doctor's test is a lot more expensive than ONE home meter test, but since I test at home multiple times I end up spending a lot more than on a doctor's visit.

It should be possible to test a glucose meter with a standard glucose solution, to see if it's calibration is grossly overestimating things. The price is no guide to its accuracy. I used to measure plasma glucose in my research job, and those assays cost pennies, yet they were accurate.

A glucose tolerance test done by some other medical practice would be interesting. But I wouldn't tell them that I'd already had a negative one. Doctors can stick together, I've known that.

I was diagnosed with a joint hypermobility condition last fall after a long period of doctors not taking me seriously and have found that getting appropriate care post-diagnosis isn't much easier, since it's hard to find doctors with a good working knowledge of the condition.

I am at the point where dealing with doctors is so upsetting and stressful, I would rather not attempt to access medical care unless it's on an emergency basis for something life-threatening. Physical therapy is the exception for me, since physical therapists typically treat based upon symptoms more than the diagnosis and PT is very helpful for my particular situation.

The symbol used by societies serving people with Ehlers Danlos and joint hypermobility conditions is a zebra, as a reference to the phrase doctors are taught in medical school about how if you see hoof prints, you should think horses and not zebras. But, of course, some patients actually are zebras and, unfortunately, really get shafted due to this mindset, which seems to lead doctors to make snap judgements, rather than take the time to actually listen to what a patient is describing and think critically about the information provided.

Not surprisingly, hypermobility and Hypermobile-EDS are more common in women than in men. These conditions can be very painful and unresponsive to analgesics, but are often misdiagnosed and not taken seriously, even when they are severe.