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Comment by dandrews | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, pancreatic cancer patient here. Mine presented as acid reflux, which my GP treated with Prilosec. Only after I went anemic and the ER staff scanned for a bleeder did they find the 8-9 cm tumor. Push your GP if necessary for some soft-tissue radiology if you feel "not right". Wish I'd caught mine a couple months earlier.

(Six months after surgery - I'm well so far, still doing chemo for the next three months. We'll see, we'll see.)

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Glad you are doing well. Pancreatic cancer is probably the scariest of all cancers, and I can hardly imagine your ordeal.

Still, one needs to be careful about taking one incident and generalizing from that. There is, for example, a very real possibility that performing an ionizing-radiation scan for every patient who presented with acid reflux would cause more cancer than it cured.

Glad that things are going ok now, but this kinda popped out at me:

> Yeah, pancreatic cancer patient here. Mine presented as acid reflux, which my GP treated with Prilosec.

The fact that you walked in with pancreatic cancer and got told you have heartburn doesn't exactly argue for regular checkups.

It's the saying doctors learn in medical school. "When you hear hooves, think horses not zebras."

Probably 99 out of 100 people with GP's symptoms (if not more) actually do have acid reflux. It therefore makes medical sense to assume that until additional symptoms indicate a different conclusion.

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