[spondylosaurus]

Genuinely? There's probably some less-than-obvious test that no one thought to run, but that if someone did run would make all the pieces fall into place.

I've shared this story before on here a few times: I have ankylosing spondylitis, and it took me a few years to get diagnosed, but even after I got diagnosed treatment didn't seem to help. Humira, steroid shots, none of it. All I could do was eat NSAIDs like candy, which helped in the short term but kinda fucked me over in the long term.

Then I saw a gastroenterologist to ask about a hemorrhoid, and he took one look at me and my file—walking with a cane at a very young age, HLA B27+, offhand complaints about "IBS" (note: it's not officially IBS unless you've ruled out other problems!)—and recommended me for a colonoscopy. My health insurance is decent, so I agreed, and he saw a bunch of inflammation in there. Turns out I have Crohn's, and the AS is likely downstream of that; when I started taking oral medication that isn't supposed to have any effect outside the GI tract, my arthritis vanished.

But your average provider won't see a patient with joint pain and skin problems and think "well obviously we need to stick a camera up their butt."