Here We Go Again-Another Idiot Doctor
I was just made aware of a story on fibromyalgia that The New York Times ran early last year. How many arrogant idiotic doctors are there in this world. Just when I feel like patients with fibromyalgia are finally getting the support and understanding they deserve, some prehistoric physician, locked in the dark ages, paints fibromyalgia with the “all in their head” label. It would be funny if it weren’t so offensive to those who battle this illness on a daily basis. Fibromyalgia is a real disease and those with the syndrome suffer real pain. Who would want to make all this up in their head?
Here is a partial snippet of the article
The Voices of Fibromyalgia
The Skeptic
Here is a partial snippet of the article
The Voices of Fibromyalgia
People who suffer from fibromyalgia experience problems beyond the pain caused by their illness. Their condition is little understood and hard to explain, and often they are disbelieved by doctors. Even friends and loved ones may express skepticism toward the fibromyalgia sufferer, who, burdened with inexplicable pain, may cancel social plans, miss work and recoil from physical affection because it hurts too much.
For a glimpse into the frustrating world of fibromyalgia sufferers, listen to the latest installment in the Patient Voices series by producer Karen Barrow.
You’ll meet Christine Wysocki, 33, of St. Augustine, Fla. who waited three years before a close friend and co-worker believed she had a health problem.
“Frankly I still don’t know if I understand exactly what it is,” says Ms. Wysocki. “Everything seems so vague about what fibromyalgia is, and it feels like no one wants to commit to what an actual answer is.”
And there’s Leon Collins, 59, of Clayton, N.J., who was relieved when he heard he had fibromyalgia because he at least had a diagnosis after many other doctors had dismissed his symptoms.
“We even experienced one doctor who wanted to send me to a psychiatrist because he felt my pain was imagined,” he said.
Count me as one of the skeptics. Not necessarily whether fibromyalgia exists, just that the vast majority of sufferers actually have it. I won’t use the word hypochondria, because I think that is inadequate. I think that many of these people suffer from a somatiform or somatization disorder. Still a disorder in need of treatment, but not fibromyalgia.
Understand, I think that this has definitely had a “wolf-crying” effect on people who do have it, and also on people who suffer, quite beyond their control, from untreated somatiform disorders. This results, not from the inability of medical science to test and confirm the diagnoses of fibromyalgia beyond cataloging the symptom complaints of sufferers, but from the fact that so many people who report these symptoms also complan of other vague maladies and bring to doctors their own self-diagnoses that the doctors have little choice but to attempt to treat them as they are reported.
This is how I put it to the last such person I spoke to: “What are the odds, mathematically, that one person should suffer from so many obscure and medically unconfirmable maladies? Maladies that have symptoms that can only be accepted or rejected based on your word that they exist?” The simple mathematical improbability that one person suffer from Meniere’s Disease, Epstein-Barr Syndrome, and Fibromyalgia, all three vague disorders that seem to show up in varied combinations among middle aged women, commonly with a history of childhood abuse, begs the question: Why are doctors being guilt-tripped into rejecting the possibility that these patients don’t suffer from what they think they suffer from, but indeed do suffer from something? Is the mere social stigma of psychological and emotional disorders enough that we should reject the possibility? I say no.
— Dr Hirschberg
Dr. Hirscberg validates that there are stupid doctors in this world and you should avoid them like the plague. If you have a skeptic for a doctor, if he or she isn’t listening to you FIRE THEM and get another doctor!
I am dealing with this right now..my dr has told me things that I know are not true, took me off pain and anxiety meds cold turkey, and in general has a blase attitude toward me and treats me like I’m just after the pain meds.
Tonya,
I agree you have a stupid doctor…you should never go cold turkey off those meds – fire him. I’m available for phone or in clinic consults 205-879-2383
I have run into doctors who treat me for awhile for Fibromyalgia and Complex Regional Pain Syndrome and after I see them the next day a letter arrives saying they quit leaving me to go off the meds cold turkey. These are the higher pain meds like fentanyl. Then on the other ends are doctors that require you pay out of pocket and the supplements cost a lot and we simply don’t have $12,000 a year to see a doctor that has a routine that works but it is just not affordable.
Totally understand. My new patient phone or in clinic consults are $129. Please call 205-879-238 to learn more.