Dr. Suzanne O'Sullivan
speaker
271 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr. Suzanne O'Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And she just couldn't face the idea of looking at her children and thinking, I'm going to die and you've got a 50-50 chance of going the same way. So she actually waited about 20 years to have the test. And she only had the test when she was so disabled by these symptoms that she realized she just had to have it confirmed. And when she went and had the test, it was negative. She didn't have it.
Obviously, yeah. But you see, that works both ways. But that's how strong it is.
You see, because all of her little symptoms didn't all go away. She still got flustered in airports, but it didn't get out of control. And that was what was happening is she's noticing little things. And because she thought she has Huntington's, then she was examining her body and thinking, what's going to happen? Because she'd seen her mom get sick. She knew exactly what was going to happen next.
next so she was really focused but imagine if 20 years ago she had the test and it was positive then every one of those symptoms none of which were due to Huntington's would have persisted that's the difficulty with knowing you're at risk of a disease that might not happen for 20 years the symptoms will start long before the disease starts and every ordinary thing that happens to you that happens to all of us every time you lose your keys every time you trip over a paving stone a
Exactly. And it shows the power of thinking you have a disease. And that's why it's so important to this discussion about pre-diabetes or autism or ADHD. If you think you have the disease, some people will display the features of the disease and that can be really hard to overcome.
And also we're back to something we said at the start about when does worrying about your health become hypochondria? It becomes a medical problem if you're impaired or disabled. And these are the subtleties of diagnosis that people don't really understand. I could look a list of ADHD symptoms and have them all, but they have to obey certain parameters for me to have an actual medical problem.
And the parameters they have to obey is they have to be there in every environment. You're not just autistic in school, you're autistic at home, you're autistic in every environment. And they have to be there to a degree that you are disabled by them. We've become very casual about this sort of like I'm on the spectrum or... I have ADHD.
Well, listen, we all have some of the traits of these things, but we do not have a medical problem unless we are impaired. And it's the impairment that makes it a medical diagnosis. And that's what everyone in TikTok is really failing to appreciate. Also, I can't remember whether it was ADHD or autism, but there was something like 11 billion TikTok videos about, I think, autism.
And when they scrutinized top 133, 27% of them provided accurate information and the other 73% were just full of inaccuracies. But that's interesting, too, because those inaccuracies are seeding themselves into medical culture as well.
Exactly. And I think we're just getting worse and worse at drawing the line between what's a normal amount of it and what is an abnormal amount of it.
Exactly. I struggle a little bit with that because I'm seeing people who are, I'm the 15th doctor they've seen and they've got 10 different diagnoses and I'm seeing a slightly different population than the TikTok population.
And I think it's difficult because you can make generalizations about what's happening in TikTok. And then I assume the people who come to me are suffering. And perhaps I don't agree with the labels and perhaps I don't agree with specific diagnosis. But I do appreciate that if they've made it all the way to my clinic, then they're not well and there's a problem.
You know, it can be very difficult for them to hear us saying things about looking for attention. There is something nice about being part of an illness group. It makes you feel validated.
They feel validated.
Yeah.
Most of them in that sort of category. Next year, there'll be something else on TikTok. These social trends occur on social media. But the difficult thing is that a small proportion of people, these diagnosis will stick and that becomes really problematic.
Lyme disease is caused by a bacteria which you get from a tick when the ticks come from deer. Lyme disease is just essentially an infectious illness, but there is a subset of Lyme disease called chronic Lyme disease.
I think they're called the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases would define chronic Lyme disease as a set of symptoms that has nothing at all to do with a Borrelia bacterial infection and nothing at all to do with Lyme disease. There's a large number of people throughout the world
who have been labeled as having a form of Lyme disease called chronic Lyme disease, which probably is not an infectious illness. Now, the difficulty is that Lyme disease can cause symptoms that we all get, like fatigue, aches and pains and things like that, which quite frankly are symptoms of everything.
What happens in society is when people are suffering with those kind of symptoms and they're struggling to get a diagnosis, they will take the diagnosis that's salient at a moment in time and chronic Lyme disease is a very salient diagnosis at the moment.
Showing 221–240 of 271 · page 12 of 14
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