However, as I was drifting to bed last night, a lot of people began contacting me about a disaster that was unfolding in California.

What I find astounding about this case is that within minutes of looking into the limited information that was available, I was relatively certain of what happened, and now that her basic labs were posted online, it was indeed what happened. However, as best as I can tell, a fairly straightforward (conventional) diagnosis was missed and Alexis Lorenze has instead been put at risk of a life threatening injury.

I was initially in disbelief this was possible (and to an extent still am), but people directly connected to the situation confirmed this indeed is the case. As this case is an instructive example of medical blindness, I felt it would be helpful to share what happened.

Note: premier academic hospitals, while less likely to have a compassionate and caring relationship with their patients, are normally better at recognizing less common diagnoses and are typically equipped with the specialized services needed to address those situations—all of which makes me particularly surprised this was missed. To some extent, I am juxtaposing my understanding of the Midwestern academic centers onto this situation, so if you are directly familiar with the UC hospital system (particularly Irvine) and there's is something I am missing here, please let me know.

Medical Blindness

A major in medicine is that doctors are frequently unable to recognize conditions which:

•Create cognitive dissonance for them (e.g., by forcing them to acknowledge they hurt a patient or accept that the guidelines their medical tribe gave them are flawed).

•They were not taught to identify to recognize (as there is so much complexity to a human being, the majority of physicians lack the innate capacity to see things they weren't taught to filter for or the willing to seriously consider the significance of things which do not make sense within their cognitive map of the world).

Because of this, physicians frequently fail to recognize a pharmaceutical injury is occurring or believe a patient who claims an injury was linked to a pharmaceutical (particularly since medical education conveniently does not train doctors to recognize these injuries and simultaneously trains them to believe anything patients report that is not backed by science is "anecdotal" and most likely a spontaneous coincidence). This in turn leads to the tragic phenomenon of "medical gaslighting" (discussed further here) something many patients understandably find infuriating.