I actually think it may be the opposite....
Disease like autoimmune gastritis can be easy to miss. It may develop slowly, cause little or no symptoms for years, and routine blood work might only show indirect clues like low ferritin, low iron, or later B12 issues. Simply: They just did not ask the right questions.
Obsessive testing may not have prevented the disease, but it may have helped uncover it at one of the earliest practical points. His routine did not fail, but save him valuable time. As you can see, even extreme monitoring cannot prevent every disease. And especially not ones that aren’t there yet..
I have autoimmune gastritis, was diagnosed last year.
You can easily spot a downward trend in B12 through blood tests, which this guy was getting regularly. If his doctors didn't notice this, they made a mistake.
You get symptoms well before b12 stores are depleted, and the symptoms are very noticeable. I went to my GP with such symptoms, she did a blood test, saw the deficiency, check past blood tests, saw the downhill pattern, ordered more tests, boom, diagnosed. At that's with the overburdened public health care we have with the NHS.
In his post he said that his B12 and iron (and hemoglobin) were and still are fine and within range. It was only his ferritin that’s been low for a while and wouldn’t budge no matter what supplements he took or timing protocols he tried. I have the same thing and no doctor seems concerned so it’s hard for me to get proper testing.
The statement that “symptoms are very noticeable” is not an universal rule. For some people, it does. For others, the symptoms may be subtle, scattered, or easily mistaken for fatigue, stress, digestive issues, low iron, thyroid problems, and the like. That’s exactly what makes autoimmune conditions so insidious.
Autoimmune gastritis does not always first show up as an obvious B12 crash. In many patients, iron deficiency or low ferritin can appear earlier, sometimes long before B12 becomes clearly depleted, because B12 stores can last a long time. Not mentioning, that he took so many suplemments, which could cober the symptoms or prolong the outcome.
And it’s a bit ridiculous to claim that, with that level of medical care, nobody noticed what you describe as such obvious and simple details. It is quite opposite. If he would be a common citizen, he would found out about the diagnosis much, much later.. maybe too late.
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u/Key_Wrangler_8321 Jul 06 '26
I actually think it may be the opposite....
Disease like autoimmune gastritis can be easy to miss. It may develop slowly, cause little or no symptoms for years, and routine blood work might only show indirect clues like low ferritin, low iron, or later B12 issues. Simply: They just did not ask the right questions.
Obsessive testing may not have prevented the disease, but it may have helped uncover it at one of the earliest practical points. His routine did not fail, but save him valuable time. As you can see, even extreme monitoring cannot prevent every disease. And especially not ones that aren’t there yet..