Chronic Illness
A community/support group for chronically ill people. While anyone is welcome, our number one priority is keeping this a safe space for chronically ill people.
This is a support group, not a place for healthy people to share their opinions on disability.
Rules
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Be excellent to each other
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Absolutely no ableism. This includes harmful stereotypes: lazy/freeloaders etc
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No quackery. Does an up-to date major review in a big journal or a major government guideline come to the conclusion you’re claiming is fact? No? Then don’t claim it’s fact. This applies to potential treatments and disease mechanisms.
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No denialism or minimisation This applies challenges faced by chronically ill people.
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No psychosomatising psychosomatisation is a tool used by insurance companies and governments to blame physical illnesses on mental problems, and thereby saving money by not paying benefits. There is no concrete proof psychosomatic or functional disease exists with the vast majority of historical diagnoses turning out to be biomedical illnesses medicine has not discovered yet. Psychosomatics is rooted in misogyny, and consisted up until very recently of blaming women’s health complaints on “hysteria”.
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Respect the Group’s Purpose. It’s a support forum for people with chronic illness to vent and share and talk together. It’s not a place for healthy people to come and give their opinions.
Did your post/comment get removed? Before arguing with moderators consider that the goal of this community is to provide a safe space for people suffering from chronic illness. Moderation may be heavy handed at times. If you don’t like that, find or create another community that prioritises something else.
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See it's perfectly understandable to not know every single little detail about the field you're trained in. What sucks is how rarely a doctor will admit they're out of their depth and need to read up on your symptoms or disease. From what I gather, this doesn't seem to just be my experience, but a rather common one. Whenever I see this post, I think about the following encounter.
Me: I have autoimmune hyperthyroidism, so, graves disease Doc: nope, graves disease is autoimmune hypOthyroidism, autoimmune hypERthyroidism is hashimotos
Like. These are so understandable to get mixed up when you're a GP. You've probably heard about each of these for like 10 minutes in uni and then studied about them for one test and forgot about them until they were relevant again. I get it, I've been the same about stuff I've learned in uni. Education isn't purely about retaining facts, and it's not humanly possible to retain every single fact you've ever learned.
What doesn't make sense is that I, who has the disease, is often quite debilitated by it, sees a specialist for it every month, and has to understand which symptoms are related to it and why (the thyroid does so many things, it's pretty complex) so I can report them to the specialist would confuse the disease with the opposite one.
So why tf do you default to me being wrong without a seconds thought or doing a 3sec web search? Think for ONE SECOND and you'll realise it doesn't make sense that I'm confusing the disease with another one that I do not have. Ugh.
That is a shit doctor. Get a new one. I got at least 4 questions on autoimmune thyroid diseases on my 300 question board exam a couple months ago. There's no goddamn excuse for that.
Graves Disease can lead to hypothyroidism through ablative treatment or if the thyroid burns itself out, but it's a hyperthyroid disease at baseline.
That behavior was pretty par for the course among all the doctors I've visited. A little more blatant than usual maybe, but the sentiment was one I'm used to. I stuck with him because he was the first ever GP out of the many I've tried to not dismiss symptoms I was describing.
I'm a 4th year medical student and I make a point of listening first and openly admitting if I don't know something and then I go look it up. I really detest the old-school doctors that are overly confident and paternalistic. It's a terrible way to practice medicine.
Honestly, it sounds like you want to be one of the good ones. Piece of advice, you were a bit dismissive with me. I said I had a bad experience that was common (among the chronically ill) and you told me you 'just get a different doctor'. As the experience is common, like I said, it genuinely isn't that easy. Most of us have tried many doctors and had an experience like this on some way with every one. So, I guess, the advice is, listen to patients who are disillusioned with the medical system and believe them when they share their experience. You seem to be super genuine and to have just had a small blind spot, so please don't take this the wrong way, I'm telling you this because I think you really want to do right by us and I think this could help.
I meant to be dismissive about that doctor's medical knowledge, not to be dismissive of your experience. I have my own complex health problems and I know that switching providers is not always easy, but if a physician who has been practicing for years doesn't know something that they put on the first and second levels of board exams, I would be suspicious of their expertise in other areas. Even before starting medical school, I would "fire" a doctor and get a new one if they told me something that was provably nonsense/wrong. Health is precious and should not be entrusted to people without the knowledge and humility to keep learning throughout their lives as medical providers.
May you never lose that sentiment or burn out over it.