Contraindicated
This archive started as a Patreon called Contraindicated: a bitter joke about spending years being screened out of care by the very system meant to provide it. The name fit the mood at the time. When I relaunch it, it will be called The Standard Problem, because what happened to me and millions of others wasn't exceptional or unusual, it was the standard, and that's the part worth documenting.
There are three categories, loosely organized by how much they made me want to close my laptop when I was done writing them.
A Note Before You Read
This writing is personal and research-informed, but it is not a diagnostic tool and it is not meant to be one. If you are reading about MS symptoms and mapping them onto your own body, please understand that almost every early MS symptom is also a symptom of something else entirely: fatigue, numbness, vision changes, and balance problems have long lists of causes, most of which are not MS. Recognizing yourself in someone's symptom history is not the same as sharing their diagnosis.
On that note: consumer genetic testing products like 23andMe do not test for MS. MS is not a straightforwardly heritable condition in the way those platforms imply their results are useful for; there is no single gene that predicts it, and a family history of MS raises your lifetime risk modestly, not dramatically. If you have 23andMe data showing relatives with neurological conditions and you are now convinced you have MS, please put that data down and talk to a neurologist rather than a saliva kit.
What this writing is for: understanding how diagnostic systems fail patients, recognizing patterns of dismissal if you are already in the process of being evaluated, and feeling less alone if you have been told your symptoms are not real. If something here resonates and you are concerned about your health, the appropriate next step is a doctor who will actually listen; and if that doctor won't, finding one who will. This site cannot help you get diagnosed. It can only document what it looked like from the inside.
Rants
Documented frustrations with systems, institutions, and recurring patterns of organizational failure. Written when I had enough data points to say something worth saying, rather than just venting.
Medical + Public Health Ethics
Essays on patient rights, structural barriers in healthcare, and the ethics of how medical information gets communicated, withheld, or distorted. Informed by my academic background in public health research and by personal experience navigating these systems.
Diagnostic Failure
What happens when symptoms are dismissed, misread, or filed under the wrong framework entirely: and what that costs patients over time.
Research & Systemic Bias
On the structural conditions that shape what gets studied, who gets believed, and why the evidence base looks the way it does.
Compliance, Access & Futures
On what the healthcare system asks patients to do, what it assumes they have, and what it might look like if repair were actually accessible.
Personal MS Essays
First-person writing about living with Multiple Sclerosis: the administrative and logistical reality of it, for me personally.
And don't forget the Body Horror of existing.