Posted by bleauberry on December 6, 2010, at 19:37:19
In reply to How could I have avoided this? New pdoc--bad!!, posted by whitmore on December 5, 2010, at 14:37:22
I can sure relate to your frustration. The problem with pdocs, and many docs actually, is that they often fail to put the clues together. Anytime a patient presents with relatively rapid mental decline and clusters of other new symptoms, a red flag should go up. This isn't depression. This is something else. But it is too easy to label it depression and completely blot out anything else.
He said "accept your condition?' Well, ok. I would have challenged him on that. I would have asked, "Is my condition Lyme, or is it dementia, or is it MS, or is it a food allergy, or is it a metal accumulation, or what is it?" He wants you to accept your condition but he never diagnosed what it was! He never did indepth testing and confirmation.
Whenever a psychiatrist sees "brain fog" or "mental confusion", that to me is a clear signal to begin some detective work. Sure there are some drugs, herbs, and supplements to help improve the symptoms, but they do nothing to identify why it is happening or to stop its progression.
A problem with specialists of all kinds, including pdocs, is that they don't see the whole picture, the whole patient, the whole body. They only see the part they studied in school.
Neurologists frequently treat people with powerful and dangerous drugs for MS, chronic fatigue, pain, and such, when the whole time they had Lyme disease and not any of those. But they didn't know the proper ways to test for Lyme, or ways to do challenge tests for Lyme, because it wasn't part of their training. Likely Lyme never even crossed their minds, even though it can exactly duplicate all of the conditions neurologists deal with every day. I just used Lyme as an easy example to illustrate the point.
The people with the best success stories are the ones that took responsibility for learning about their own symptoms, possible causes, and treatments, upon themselves. The doctor is useful as a partner in the journey, but not necessarily the one behind the steering wheel. If you've ever seen the documentary shows on TV like Mystery Diagnosis, it is almost always the patient that pointed the way for the doctor.....12 doctors later and thousands of dollars later.
The Lyme example again. Do you know where most doctors send their Lyme patients? To a psychiatrist. Why? Because they have depression commonly, or stuff that looks enough like depression to conclude it is. Lyme was not even considered, and in rare cases when it was it was tested for improperly and came back negative. I'm sorry, but Lyme patients don't see their depression get better on antidepressants, they get better on antibiotics. And some herbs.
With the mental fogginess and decline, it's the same scenario. Something is going on. You need someone with some creativity to look deeper, and you need a lot of research on your own.
poster:bleauberry
thread:972602
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20101203/msgs/972741.html