fogweaver

we didn't even manage to raise the money for his immune globulin injection last week, and we are now, on top of that, about $1k in debt to the doctor for the iv fluids he had to take for that.

that has to be paid for in conjunction with his urgent digoxin injection, which he will die without, which means the minimum amount we have to raise by tuesday 4 pm gaza time is $2,129.

i am really not feeling optimistic, because we had to urgently evacuate the family last week from israel's active bombing and no one cared enough to contribute almost any donation at all, even as small as $5 - only a small handful of people chipped in.

if we don't get this money before the end of tuesday, ammar will need over $6k, as it will include an intensive injection on top of everything we already have to pay

and i know we're not going to get that, so really what will happen is he will die

i don't know what i can say to convince you to help keep him alive, but i beg you not to let israel successfully kill him

$0 / $3537

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while i thank everyone who contributed with donations, unfortunately, we only raised $178 for this so far

we really need the immune globulin injection before 10 am thursday samah's time, tomorrow, which is about 20 hours from now, so i have cut down the temporary goal right now to focus only on this

if we take longer than that time, ammar will need more iv fluids - but, because we didn't pay for the previous amounts we had to use, he won't be able to receive them. this means he'll probably die, or certainly be much worse off

therefore, we urgently need to raise enough for that injection. he badly needs it, just like the digoxin injection

we still need $807 more in order to pay for that

two general methods are typically used to interpret standard lab blood tests: reference intervals and clinical decision limits. reference intervals are a range of the central 95% of results of a population deemed "healthy". they are not a measure of optimal physiological function, its just normal distribution. broad, generalised and nonspecific. subtle abnormalities will not be taken into consideration. a result outside the reference range may not be clinically significant and likewise, a result within the reference range may indicate a greater underlying issue yet go undetected. these values are not extremely useful in isolation and should be considered alongside patient history and symptoms. and you just know its not happening a lot of the time. clinical decision limits are cutoffs determined to be associated with known clinical risks. they are actionable thresholds where your doctor actually has to do something. the data for these values comes from previous studies therefore only exists for conditions that are well-characterised enough.

there is a prevalent and endorsed attitude where it is discouraged to order extensive tests and perform excessive investigation if a patient doesn't seem to deviate from the norm in any quantifiable way. pre-test probability is the (inherently flawed) concept of estimating the chance that a patient actually has a condition prior to performing diagnostic tests. it factors in things like disease prevalence, patient symptoms, family history etc to determine whether investigation is worthwhile. reasons behind this are to cut down on healthcare costs, the fact that many diagnostic tests do have relatively low specificity (ability to correctly identify those without the disease) and/or sensitivity (ability to correctly identify those with the disease), the fact that many tests do have adverse effects (radiation from x rays and CT scans, anaemia from blood tests). they also apparently do this to reduce patient anxiety and avoid overdiagnosis.

you can see how biased and subjective this is. if you suspect you have a disease with a 1 in 1000 prevalence rate then you have a pre-test probability of 0.1% without any family history or specific symptoms. the doctor is most likely not going to conduct any kind of investigation in this case even if you actually do have the condition. if you don't describe your symptoms sufficiently in a way the doctor correctly interprets you have decreased the chance of a proper investigation being carried out.

but: many diseases are progressive and undetectable in their early stages and present with a range of non-specific symptoms. so in order for you to receive a diagnosis, significant disease progression needs to occur before treatment is started. and for diseases that are rare or poorly characterised, by the nature of how the diagnostic process actually works (the necessity of the doctor actively considering your history and symptoms and ordering tests where they see appropriate compared with how often they just don't) you may never actually reach the treatment stage.

>>>hypovolemic POTS patients are walking around every day with less blood than healthy people who have just donated blood to the Red Cross.<<<