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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Appearances
No, obviously you can't withhold those kind of findings, although, you know, I don't want to frighten your listeners in any way, but, you know, doctors, to a certain degree, withhold things all the time, you know, because it's quite unusual, not things of the magnitude of cancer, I should add, but, you know, it's quite unusual.
If you see a patient and you do a bunch of blood tests and a couple of scans and a chest X-ray and a few things, you know, the likelihood that every one of those tests is going to come back saying, giving a 100% clean bill of health is actually quite unusual because every single blood test is open to a range of different results and scans constantly show little white spots and cysts and things.
You know, they are just incredibly common. And it's a doctor's job all the time to decide what is important and what is unimportant. You know, we could frighten the living daylights out of our patients if we kind of made a big deal of everything abnormal we found on tests. Medicine is an art, diagnosis is an art. So a doctor is constantly sort of weighing up
little irregularities that they find on tests against their patient's story and deciding whether those irregularities are worth a mention or not. But of course, screen cancer, well, that's a whole other story. But it is part of the art of medicine to decide what is important and what isn't.
And there is an argument for some tests, not cancer per se, but some tests that, you know, not everything needs to be passed on to the patient if it's judged to be likely to cause them more anxiety instead of putting their minds at ease.
Yeah, I mean, you know, there's surprisingly few real emergency situation unless you're working in a big trauma center where you're constantly seeing road traffic accidents, etc. You know, a lot of a lot of medicine isn't an emergency situation and a lot of time a better diagnosis is made and the patient is better treated if you take a little bit of time to think.
And most problems are not rapidly progressive. And usually, you know, a patient working in concert with the doctor, where the doctor has a few meetings so that you can kind of really get a sense of the story and that you can kind of understand the person you're speaking to. That's how you make an accurate diagnosis.
Feeling a need to label things immediately to satisfy the patient isn't necessarily the best type of medicine. And very often, things disappear. I'm sure you already know this, but doctors don't have the answer to everything. We don't know what causes every ache and pain. We don't know why people go through various transient symptoms.
Once we've ruled out through the history and examination anything serious, often the safest strategy is just a series of meetings and time to think.
I was the absolute ultimate tourist. Oh, good. I did everything that you'd expect a tourist to do. First, I did the Universal Studios tour.
I was very surprised. So because I'm only here for a brief period, I paid for like the most expensive tour. And it was six hours around the studios, what I thought. I didn't realize it was a theme park. I didn't know that.
I did for six hours. Oh, my God. And the very first thing that happened was they put me on the Harry Potter ride. Oh, yeah.
The effects and everything are amazing, but it was just very disorientating when you were expecting something entirely different.
I wear a lot of green, but I do identify very strongly as Irish. I mean, I'm from Ireland.
Yeah, exactly. It's 100% Irish, but I've lived in England for a long time.
Yeah, so I run seizure clinics and most people who are referred to me, they've been having a variety of different kind of convulsions or other types of seizures. Usually they come to me with a pre-existing diagnosis of epilepsy. And in the best week or the best year, a fifth of those do not have epilepsy. The seizures they're having have a purely psychological cause.
So their brains are shutting down for a purely psychological reason. And that's something that we as neurologists see all the time. That is so common. As I always explain to patients, our brains shut down in certain overwhelming situations all the time. You know that sort of you're really overloaded with information. You're listening to the radio.
You're trying to hear a sports result or a particular thing and you miss it like 10 times. And you keep rewinding and rewinding and rewinding and missing the same thing multiple times.
That's dissociation. That's what our brains do to protect us in moments of being overwhelmed. It's like everything in the body. Some people have too much hair. People have too little hair. Everything goes a bit wrong in some way. And this thing called dissociation, which is designed to just help us to control the overwhelming amount of information in our environments. sometimes goes wrong.
And when it goes wrong, it can cause people to faint. It can cause people to collapse. It can cause people to have convulsions. And it's so common that this would be part of the bread and butter of a neurologist job.
Showing 41–60 of 271 · page 3 of 14
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