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"It's a nice day, let's go out and pick some wild vegetables, shall we?" Li Weiwei said to her friend with a smile, picking up her usual loose coat.
Despite the sunny weather, Li Weiwei's mood is difficult to completely relax, because she has been feeling some discomfort in her back lately.
But with the encouragement of her friends, she decided to enjoy the sunshine today.
Weiwei Li, a 57-year-old experienced dietitian, is always busy developing healthy eating plans for clients and managing her own small nutrition consulting company.
Today, she and three friends went to the suburbs, planning to pick some fresh wild vegetables and chat about their health topics by the way.
As everyone chatted more and more, the conversation gradually turned to everyone's recent physical condition.
As she listened to her friends discuss arthritis and high blood pressure, she began to think about her back pain.
She brought the issue up to her friends, but everyone thought it was just a common strain injury or a common problem with age.
"You know, I feel like my back is trying to tell me something. Li Weiwei said half-jokingly, but there was a hint of worry in her tone.
In fact, the pain has been bothering her for months, starting with mild soreness and gradually progressing to the point where she has trouble sleeping almost every night.
At first, Li Weiwei only felt occasional soreness between her back and shoulders, and thought it was just an ordinary muscle accumulation strain.
But as time passed, she felt more and more that this pain was not so simple. She tried to rest, tried to massage, but none of these methods seemed to work.
What's even stranger is that the pain seems to have something to do with breathing, and every time I take a deep breath, my back hurts like a needle prick.
One night, the pain was so unbearable that Li Weiwei decided to go to the hospital to find out thoroughly. After a series of physical examinations and scans, the doctor's diagnosis made her completely devastated - non-small cell lung cancer.
Li Weiwei burst into tears on the spot, she couldn't accept it, because she had never touched a cigarette in her life, and her life was quite regular, why did she suffer from lung cancer?
The doctor patiently explained to her that lung cancer is insidious, and the early symptoms are not obvious, so it is easy to be ignored.
In Li's case, the pain in her back was actually due to a tumor in her lungs compressing the surrounding nerves, causing what is known as "metastatic spinal pain".
This pain is not uncommon in medicine, especially in patients with advanced lung cancer, as the pain is more pronounced because the tumor may spread to the pleura or thoracic spine.
Through communication with doctors and other patients, Li Weiwei learned that a significant number of lung cancer patients miss the best time for treatment because they ignore the early symptoms.
The doctor mentioned that early detection of lung cancer is extremely critical because the success rate of early treatment is much higher than that of advanced stage.
In this story, we can see that even seemingly unrelated symptoms, such as back pain, can be a warning of a serious illness.
Through Lee's story, we are reminded that no matter how trivial the symptoms may seem, they are worth digging into to make sure we don't miss any warnings about our health.
Why are the early symptoms of some serious diseases often overlooked, even in today's medically advanced world?
Hidden behind this question is the need for an in-depth analysis of the modern healthcare system, especially on how to improve public education and awareness of early symptom recognition.
Insufficient public awareness of the early symptoms of the disease may be related to uneven dissemination of information, unequal distribution of medical resources, and misinterpretation of health information.
In response to these factors, strategies to improve the early diagnosis rate of diseases should include increasing the access to public health education, improving communication between doctors and patients, and using technology, such as artificial intelligence and big data, to better predict and diagnose early symptoms.
What do you think about this? Welcome to discuss in the comment area!