The Doctors' Way

"The... patient should be made to understand that he or she must take charge of his own life. Don't take your body to the doctor as if he were a repair shop."
— Quentin Regestein: Psychiatrist and associate professor

I’m not going to put all doctors into the same category to either praise or criticize them. But when you interact with doctors you find out that a good majority of them were taught a certain “way” and they follow it to the letter.

“The doctors’ way” consists of measuring and documenting objective conditions, also commonly referred to as doing “medical tests.” Doctors want to know your temperature, blood pressure, cholesterol level, red and white blood cell count, etc. They send you to places to have your blood drawn, your chest x-rayed, and your breasts flattened & photographed. The whole point of all this is to determine if the test results are “normal” or “abnormal.” And if they are abnormal, the point is to determine whether the abnormalities point to a certain “diagnosis.”

“The “doctors’ way” is to test you & diagnose you, at which point they will usually declare one of three things, either you are well, you need drugs, or you need surgery.

With fibromyalgia, all of the tests come back normal. A little detour here – If you have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and any of your tests are abnormal (unless you have something else along with the fibro which accounts for the abnormal tests), push for a different diagnosis. See a different doctor.

For some doctors, diagnosing fibromyalgia takes them out of their comfort zone. There are a ton of subjective abnormalities such as the patient complaining about pain, but there are little or no objective abnormalities that can be measured. All their tests seem to reveal to them that the patient is well.

So the first problem with “the doctors’ way” is that it can not determine if a fibromyalgia patient under their care is getting better or worse (or if they are even sick in the first place).

The second problem with “the doctors’ way” is that it sometimes fails to provide the patient with the best alternative.

This second problem was brought home to me when I developed little hive-like bumps from the bottom of my chin to my toes. I itched like someone who had been rolling in poison ivy. I covered myself with anti-itch cream and made an appointment with a doctor. My regular doctor was booked up so I agreed to see someone unknown to me from the same clinic. She diagnosed me pretty quickly as having “an allergy.” She pronounced the cure to be “prednisone.” I’m sure I surprised her when I asked if there was another alternative. Being a fibromyalgia patient and sensitive to chemicals, I’m dreadfully hesitant about taking new drugs, especially something as potent as prednisone. She declared “Well, you could figure out what you are allergic to and eliminate it.” We then established that I had changed nothing in my life but that sometimes people become allergic to things suddenly for no apparent reason. She said, “It is probably your clothes or your laundry detergent since you don’t have any bumps above the line of your clothing.” I changed my clothes to 100% cotton and my laundry detergent to “Planet,” which is hypo-allergenic (it also turns out that it is unscented and friendly to the environment). www.planetinc.com My bumps went away and have not returned.

In hindsight, being the intelligent person that I am, I should have been able to figure out that I must be allergic to either my clothes or my detergent, but I didn’t. I needed the doctor to observe that “the bumps ended at the line of my clothing,” but I really didn’t need the doctor to prescribe prednisone. Now prednisone can be the perfect solution (and sometimes the only solution) in some cases and I don’t mean to imply otherwise. Still, if I had simply accepted the first words out of her mouth, I might still be wearing the wrong materials, washing them in the wrong products, and taking prednisone with no hope of ever being able to stop.

Doctors can sometimes provide wonderful, almost miraculous solutions to problems that we can’t solve ourselves. But I wonder if they too often prescribe drugs instead of addressing lifestyle issues. Would your doctor tell you that what you need is to stop smoking, stop drinking, loose weight, eat more healthy foods, dispose or your cat, or change your laundry detergent? If those things don’t come easily, maybe you want to ask some questions before you accept the next prescription. Sometimes prescriptions are necessary and sometimes there really are more desirable solutions.