I would describe my relationship with my MD as antagonistic. We have not had a very good experience together since ES/MCS and I have a lot of negative feelings about her, about bio-medicine, scientific inquiry, evidence-based research, reductionist paradigms – really the entire medical industrial complex leaves me reeling!! Bio-medicine has its place and has certainly contributed a great deal of good to the world. My MD did some things right and she did some things very wrong and the wrong that she did was harmful and her responsibility was to ‘do no harm’.
I can still see her pleading with me, “don’t do this.” Like I was making everything up and just needed to stop with the playing around. She treated me like a child and told me about how SSRIs helped her when she was going through some stuff and assured me it could help me too.
Are you even listening to me?
Have you heard anything that I have said?
I get that you are in a hurry and that you needed to move on to your next patient. I know that all the tests came back negative. You could have told me that you didn’t know what was going on or that you would continue to work with me to find answers. That is not what you did. Instead you delegitimized my experience and threw “I practice evidence based medicine” around and topped it all off with a mental illness diagnosis.
It’s all in your head.
Is not something that a person who has suffered a great deal of physical pain, to a person who didn’t leave bed for months, who could barely walk or function, had to leave their job…wants to hear.
It isn’t in my head, its in my body.
The tests weren’t giving up any evidence and there was only one conclusion – it’s in your head.
It took me 18 months to finally find a doctor who could diagnose me and provide some direction and treatment. It took me 18 months to see a doctor that knew the right tests to order and came up with a very different perspective.
It’s not in my head actually. And you need to do a better job as a MD, because you suck at this and maybe you should check out some MainProC courses to supplement your shitty medical practice, so that maybe in the future you won’t harm your patients.
It is standard practice for a patient to be called in for an appointment to review results following test results or diagnosis and reports from other specialists. But you didn't call me in when the results from the environmental physician arrived. I didn’t hear a word about it and I know they were sent to you.
Was this just another way to avoid dealing with me?
This antagonistic relationship has created a huge barrier for me and has kept me from getting medical treatment over the last three years. I started getting letters from the government reminding me that I needed to have my pap done – its been three years.
There are so many things that I would like to say to my MD. I have been very angry at her for a very long time and it has done neither of us any good. She continues to go about her ‘evidence based medical practice’ and my health is put at further risk. I have learned a lot through this process about medicine and health and I need a MD that is going to work along side me, in a partnership. I need a MD that will do the tests that I request, and refer me to the specialists that I want to see, and to advocate for me when I need it. I need a MD that will do their research on topics they perhaps don’t understand and most of all, I need a MD that will admit when they JUST DON’T KNOW.
‘I don’t know’ is a perfectly reasonable answer! It is an honest answer.
Three years later, I have a little more perspective on everything. And I have set out on my own healing journey and have seen a 85% improvement in my health. I have learned about many different kinds of healing and paradigms of health, including plant medicine. Now I have some perspective and I see that you and I, we’re just not working from the same paradigm and we will not understand each other. This relationship is just not working out and I think it is time for me to move on.
I have learned a lot about myself and my body in the last three years, which I hope will make the transition to my next MD easier. I have a good idea about what I need from an MD and I have a clearer understanding of what they can and can’t do, which will help me manage my expectations within the relationship. But at a core level, if you believe that I am mentally ill and that all of my physical symptoms are the result of a mental illness, we will not be able to work together.
We now know that the immune system and brain are connected. People have neuro-immune illnesses that are environmentally linked and triggered by our increasingly contaminated planet. There is a huge population of people living with ES/MCS, CFS, ME, FM who are not receiving adequate health care and are living isolated, dispossessed lives. Collectively, we make up a larger portion of the population than those with medically validated health concerns such as heart disease and our illnesses receive less funding for research than male pattern baldness.
It is simply no longer acceptable to me to have a dismissive MD. There is plenty of ‘evidence-based’ research on the biological basis of ES/MCS. Many emerging illnesses have been contested at some point in their history, but nearly 30 years have passed now. It is time to get with the program here. ES/MCS is not new. It is also not RARE.
Enough time has passed. Enough research has been conducted. Environmentally linked illness must be fully recognized and we need to be challenging and critiquing our current bio-medical paradigms in order to adequately deal with the storm of emerging illnesses arising from our contaminated environments. Multi-system illness and disease exists and is very real despite reductionist bio-medical science and practice.
Deal with it!
At the very least, the time has come for me to leave this unhealthy and harm-filled relationship with my MD. I feel relieved and empowered in making this choice.
It feels pretty badass to fire your doctor!
