Chapter 628: Chapter 264: Unraveling Diagnosis, Misfortune Seeks the Suffering
After the patient left, Director Zheng stood up and firmly grasped Zhou Can’s hand.
“Dr. Zhou, thank you for coming over to help! Diagnosing this case is very difficult. After the small intestine perfusion test results are out, we will still need your continued assistance in diagnosis.”
Zheng Hongtao treated Zhou Can with such regard because diagnosing this disease heavily relied on Zhou Can.
Moreover, if he could solve a disease that even big hospitals could not cure and successfully treat the patient, it would greatly benefit him.
The authority and reputation of a specialist is built up by diagnosing and treating challenging cases in the relevant fields, as well as publishing high-impact, high-quality papers, bit by bit.
Tall buildings rise from the ground; large trees grow from tiny seeds.
Famous doctors are never made overnight.
Those who become famous from one or two cases and are called the ‘Divine Doctor’ are usually ‘charlatan divine doctors’. Mostly they are fraudsters, with not a single true ‘Divine Doctor’ among them.
Patients travel thousands of miles, going a great distance to seek treatment, essentially paying a stupidity tax.
Of course, there may be some genuine ‘Divine Doctors’. They might be traditional Chinese medicine practitioners hidden from the world, without medical licenses, possibly living dissolute lives, or appearing more like charlatans.
But they possess some lost traditional Chinese medical techniques and truly relieve patients of their suffering.
Moreover, there’s a fundamental difference between these divine doctors and the charlatans.
They treat and heal not for money but charge minimal fees, and like ancient Chinese doctors, they may even treat poor patients for free. They bear financial losses to treat patients, only aiming to alleviate the patients’ pain.
Charlatans, on the other hand, are all about schemes and scams, like so-called ‘healing through energy’ or claiming that a certain folk remedy can cure all diseases, and so on.
Without exception, it’s all about tricking people into paying the stupidity tax.
Even if after their treatment, patients feel much better, it is merely a psychological effect.
From a medical perspective, those supposed cure-all medicines are without exception fake, mere health supplements, specifically designed to swindle people.
From Zhou Can’s professional viewpoint, an effective medicine always has strong toxic side effects.
They can only treat very specific types of diseases, not cure everything.
Such medicines are generally prescription drugs, hard for patients to obtain themselves.
When prescribing medicines, doctors also need to deliberate carefully, considering everything before daring to write a prescription.
After Zhou Can returned to the office from the outpatient clinic, he continued to write case histories, track disease progression, and review medical orders.
As he became more skilled at independently writing medical orders, he increasingly felt his own experience and knowledge were inadequate. Besides seeking more advice from senior doctors, he thought of several other methods to quickly improve his level of writing medical orders.
He spent every day earnestly reading books, greedily supplementing his basic medical knowledge, which was a given.
Also, he utilized his access to browse through various past treatment cases in the department. He learned from the medical orders written by Director Shang, Director Zheng, Deputy Director Shi, and others, gaining from their experience.
This method was very effective.
For each case he reviewed, he gained 1 point of Pharmacological differentiation Experience Points and 1 point of Pathological Diagnosis Experience Points.
Truly killing several birds with one stone.
Around six o’clock in the afternoon, the patient with diarrhea and diabetes insipidus completed the small intestine perfusion test, and the family members took the results to Director Zheng Hongtao. Then Director Zheng came to the office with the results to find Zhou Can.
After all, as a director, seeking Zhou Can’s help again and again in front of the family members was somewhat embarrassing.
So he sent the family members away and came alone with the test results to find Zhou Can.
Analyzing and diagnosing such complex cases was extremely difficult.
Discussing with Zhou Can wasn’t something other doctors would laugh at.
Besides, many doctors came to Zhou Can for help all the time.
Now even the young nurses in the department were coming to Zhou Can for assistance.
For instance, they needed help with inserting catheters or encountering difficulty finding veins in obese patients and so on.
All came to Zhou Can for assistance.
The pretty nurses in their twenties called him ‘Brother Can’, and Zhou Can couldn’t turn them down.
Unless he was particularly busy, he would go over and help them.
Earning experience points while gaining their gratitude was something he was happy to do.
Especially procedures like catheter insertion or tracheal intubation, he could earn 1 point of Insertion Experience Points for each operation, and sometimes he might even get a bonus of 10 points of Insertion Experience Points.
“Dr. Zhou, based on the small intestine perfusion test, it is proven that there is a substantial secretion of water and electrolytes in the patient’s intestines, which allows for a preliminary diagnosis of secretory diarrhea.”
Zheng Hongtao presented him with the test results.
The patient also underwent routine stool tests and bacterial cultures, which came out negative.
This could exclude the possibility of chronic bacterial enteritis.
The common types of diarrhea are four: secretory diarrhea, osmotic diarrhea, exudative diarrhea, and diarrhea caused by gastrointestinal dysfunction.
Exudative diarrhea is essentially what’s commonly known as inflammatory diarrhea.
For example, enteritis.
Therefore, routine stool tests and bacterial cultures are very significant for diagnosis. The results of the bacterial culture were negative, and now they can directly rule out exudative diarrhea.
The small intestine perfusion test helped them directly identify the patient as having secretory diarrhea.
“The patient’s stool routine indicates that the excretion of potassium, sodium, chloride, and bicarbonate is all severely above the normal values. The highest is even twenty times the standard level. No wonder the patient couldn’t hold up.”