One of the first things I noticed across my Reddit feed in 2022 was an insane amount of throat pictures, showing the most intense and angry throat inflammation I had ever seen. Every doctor that responded reassured the patient that they just had another case of strep, but as the photos continued to pile up so did my concerns.
First off, these individuals were complaining of chronic irritation - no matter what they did, their throat issues would always return and nothing that was prescribed to them did anything to help. Secondly, the presentation of the throat never seemed to coincide with severe symptoms – these chronic inflammations were occurring outside of a systematic immune response.
If you click the post above, you can read why this is so unusual and read up on what differentiates concerning throat inflammation from regular throat infections and inflammation.
In that post I hypothesized that what we were seeing was not a throat infection, but a first signs of systemic immune dysfunction - where chronic antibody production was leading to chronic inflammation, ultimately leading to the disfiguring of the throat tissue and paraneoplastic growths.
Here are 70 screenshots I took yesterday, all of which are pretty terrifying. You'll notice many of the posts described chronic throat issues spanning months. You'll also see plenty of posts who have been to the doctor multiple times and been told they have nothing to worry about.
What concerns me most is how young most of these individuals are and how insanely frequent these posts are being made across r/diagnoseme, r/askdocs, r/askdentists and r/askdoctorsmeee.
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