It's entirely obvious what happened... the party was reported - somebody expressed worry it was a rave, and informed the police of the facebook group, which they themselves checked. The police were not seeking out parties on facebook - it was cited and they checked it.

1) The police didn't scour facebook - locals did, saw it, and reported it as a rave.

2) The helicopter was out anyway, and they just asked the helicopter to fly over the site to really check if there was a party on its way back

It was not police scouring facebook and dispatching a helicopter.

It embarrasses and annoys me that this happened in my own country, which I do love dearly, but I wont let the usual anti-UK/US/Australia facebook crowd exaggerate it further.

Now this I do agree with - I think one thing this story may highlight is the problems of the American healthcare system. I like to tell myself that this wouldn't happen in the UK - where there is huge pressure to keep up ones skills, every doctor having annual appraisals, relationships build between the patient and his local doctor/hospital etc. - I regularly get attached to smaller peripheral hospitals and there really is a sense of community

I'm not sure if this is actually true, or just wishful thinking on my part. I don't expect the biopsy to be dealt with any better in the UK, but I like to think that we would lose fewer patients in the system, like this. As you said, there is little incentive in the US to look over old biopsy samples, whilst in the UK it would be a relatively cost-efficient investigation. Who knows?

Don't be crass. You obviously don't understand the level of investigation we're talking here. It is just not possible in a patient like this to examine every single piece of sampled tissue 100%, not unless you want to spend a day on every patient and reduce the wellbeing of the population, to eliminate an already very unlikely diagnosis. Do you know how small cells are? The sample's we're talking are many macroscopic lumps if tissue, cut in cross sections into many more slides, the granulomas we're talking about are groups of 30 or so cells. This could have been the only one. How long do you expect the doctors to look for it? It would be stupid to expect to look all over every sample.

And I find your example a bit hard to swallow - sorry the nurse shouldn't be TOLD the drugs, she should read them from the drug chart, to eliminate human error. Also, you imply that if he had used the right name then the nurse would have spotted the drug interaction? No, sorry, no nurse in the world will argue with a specialist about drug interactions - doctors and nurses are incredibly important in patient care, and they fulfil completely different roles - the nurses role is NOT to spot drug interactions, they are not taught about them, and the doctor knows best about these things. Similarly, I wouldn't expect the doctor to tell the nurse how to do aspects of her job.

I'm sorry, where's the evidence saying it took 7 years to look for Crohn's? These slides may have been taken years ago. Really you do need endoscopy with bopsy, which this girl had and unfortunately came back negative. Whilst radiographs like CTs etc. and barium enemas/swallows can show lesions, this is only really with small bowel involvement leading to strictures, which she may well not have had. There are no specific antibodies like you get with Coeliac's diseases (anti-gliadin/anti-endomysial), and whilst you might get inflammatory markers like CRP/ESR raised in the blood, or leukocytes etc. in the faeces, these aren't remotely remotely specific for Crohn's, and would be expected in most GI pathology.

Yes, I've acknowledged that - as I said the pathologist will have been presented with many many samples, turned into slides, looking for a few, if any, granulomata, which are tiny in size. I even said "Now do you start to see why a pathologist may miss it?" It is very hard, if not impossible, to scan every single slide in its entirity, for a granuloma. Fortunately this girl found it, when the pathologist didn't. Props to her,

She obviously just requested her own tissues, RTFA

"she was looking under the microscope at slides of her own intestinal tissue -- slides her pathologist had said were completely normal"

In a year's time I will be a doctor, and have just spent a year learning about pathology, so I thought I'd put my view forward. The interesting thing about Crohn's disease, in contrast to the other big type of inflammatory bowel disease (Ulcerative colitis) is that it is characterised by skip lesions. The disease is not confluent over the entire gut, in fact it can be anywhere from mouth to anus, in small patches. Now do you start to see why a pathologist may miss it? They will have taken many specimens from the girl's GI tract, and if this is the only sample with a granuloma, then it's not too unforgiveable that a patch of cells only around 30 cells-wide is miss. Yes, it sucks, but pathology is actually a fairly bloody hard speciality, with an very vigorous set of examinations, at least in the UK, so don't imply that these pathologists don't know what Crohn's is. Life isn't black and white, and medicine is just the same.

Maybe you guys instantly thought Crohn's, but there are plenty of other rarer diseases it could have been. Without a positive biopsy it would have been incredibly immoral to slap a Crohn's diagnosis on this girl and medicated her for it. It would have proved interesting were she have had say tropic sprue and you were to treat her with the immunosupressants.

Since I always have my IRC client (mIRC) open then I just use that. It has a function called $calc. I just made an alias using the command:

/alias calc //echo = $calc( $1- )

And now /calc 2+3 will echo 5.

It's called the iPlayer. Check it out.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/

I use it on my laptop with ubuntu all the time