I warned you yesterday that I will be going totally overboard with the EDS awareness posts and zebra pictures this month.

To kick us off here is a quick explanation of “Why the Zebra?”

Medical students/junior doctors have always traditionally been taught to look for the simplest explanation when diagnosing a patient in order to prevent misdiagnosis of rare conditions.  If it looks like a horse and it sounds like a horse……if you hear hooves, think horse…..etc!

In medicine the term zebra is used to describe a rare disease/illness/condition, but often it can feel that medics forget that whilst rare, zebras do exist and can struggle to get a diagnosis and treatment.  This is frequently the case for Ehlers Danlos Syndrome patients, and so we have become known as medical zebras.  This has been adopted by the worldwide community now as the identity for EDS and through the use of social media helps to unite us.