You know, if you're in the US and you need medical care, there are other options besides trying to use the US medical system. Some of them are even more reliable than trying to diagnose your own diseases using your own microscope (and safer than trying to treat your own diseases).

Mexico has excellent health care for "rich people", where "rich" has a lower bar to entry than in the US. If you talk to Mexican-Americans, you will hear horror stories about how they had to go on a trip to Juarez or Tijuana to get proper treatment when the US system failed them — sometimes not soon enough. Costa Rica has lots of medical tourism. Argentina is world-famous for its medical care; we recently had a woman from New Zealand who stayed with us (via couchsurfing.com) while she got a bunch of dental work here. Thailand is becoming popular too. I don't know about Canada, but the care we got in the ER there was similar to what we would have gotten in the US (it was just a dislocated shoulder) but cost 10% as much.

Yes definitely, see Sicko (documentary) for more info about the standard of the american medical system.

How does one get a sample of their own intestinal tissue? Seems pretty advanced even for an AP course.

They were "slides her pathologist had said were completely normal." So I assume the pathologist took the samples, and she took one home for research.

I said "Chron's" to myself when reading the first 2 lines of the article and I'm not even near a medical degree =)

Your description of the illness changes if you know what it is.

My partner was recently diagnosed with Crohn's and she had to get some major surgery to fix the damage. The doctors kept mis-diagnosing her, but it wasn't as much as 8 years.

It's a horrible genetic disease and only now are doctor's really starting to understand it - even now they are finding that there is a whole subset of diseases being lumped in as Crohn's.

Did anyone talk to you about parasite therapy: http://www.webmd.com/ibd-crohns-disease/news/20040519/wormy-...