“Out Patients”

In this reading “Out Patients”,  Elise Wu realized that she had a symptom of pretending to be sick. She is trying to portray the life of a patient with the same symptoms as her in this article. She searched the Internet for relevant information, but she didn’t think she was completely suffering from the problem. Elise wu creates a verbal portrait of this online community and this disease is referred to as FD. People with FD deliberately create physical or psychological symptoms to assume only the role of a patient. No other motivation But she observed that FDers couldn’t truly face the impact of the truth. For example, family members and friends around them and doctors are angry at them. And the emotion that they are not taken seriously makes these people post their true thoughts on the online community. She found the information and answers given on some of Dr. Marc Feldman’s web pages and learned more about the disease. She then learned about many FDers’ experiences by reading different messages in the forum. In order to get more details, she joined this community and she wants to know how many have found herself here. She triangulates data with different online resources. She looked up web page information, professional articles, and messages from various forums. Elsie Wu will mark the details of each of her records to help her organize the information more conveniently. Later she became aware of it and walked out of her pretending illness. The role of footnotes in wu’s text helps build credibility, not only for readers to better understand but also for articles that look more organized.

Comments ( 2 )

  1. Milton Isaiah Rivera
    I like how you mentioned that what connected her to this essay was her own experience with FD, and not only did but how she walked away from this condition. Also, it is interesting that you spoke about people with FD not being able to face the truth because when Wu did she noticed that people in her life may have been annoyed by her condition.
  2. Iqra Jan
    I like how you mentioned how people in FD community feel not taken seriously with this condition. you also nicely added her connection with people having FD telling her experience and putting herself as part of the FD community.

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