It’s a summer day and a 45-year-old is out for a drive. As she accelerates her stick-shift car, she starts to experience familiar, and scary, symptoms: facial tingling, numbness around her mouth, and a sharp pain in her hands. Her hands cramp and lock onto the steering wheel. Fortunately, she makes it home safely, but it will take many wrong turns and the help of Dr. Google to determine a diagnosis of hypoparathyroidism, a rare bone disorder. Dr. Michael Mannstadt, the Chief of the Endocrine Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor in Medicine at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, shares this patient’s story and how a clinical trial changed this patient’s life.
