Tim Almond

It’s not normal for me to link to anything in the Daily Mail, but this article stood out for me on the subject of temporomandibular joint pain dysfunction syndrome or TMD.

I suffered from this for a year or more after my dentist failed to think it had anything to do with some dental work (despite problems starting a day or so after that), after my GP couldn’t diagnose it and thought it would go away, as did a locum, a 2nd GP and after an Ear Nose and Throat (ENT) specialist said it had nothing to do with my jaw.

The thing is that I’d assumed that what I had was extremely rare, but reading the article makes me even more angry at the incompetent NHS:-

‘TMD is often misdiagnosed,’ says Professor Renton. ‘People go to the doctor complaining of earache or a headache, the doctor can’t see anything wrong, so sends the patient away or advises them to go to a dentist.

Isn’t this supposedly one of the benefits of a centralised health service, that when a practitioner diagnoses a problem, it can go into a base of knowledge that everyone can draw on? It wouldn’t need much, just a pointer from one doctor to another that they could follow up on as a possibility. Patient gets fixed quicker and doctors stop wasting time. Geeks do this all the time. They get an odd bug, ask for help, and frequently if they solve it themselves, post the way they fixed it. Why can’t the multi-billion pound NHS do this?

Tags: Eustation, Health //