Doctors and ME/CFS
Posted on March 29, 2008
Filed Under CFS |
Despite the World Health Organisation listing ME as a real neurological illness, many doctors - my own included - still think the illness is all in the mind. When I first became ill, it was clear that my doctor wanted to do anything but give me a proper diagnosis. Mention the words ME or CFS and he’d practically laugh in my face. It wasn’t until I’d seen a private consultant who confirmed the diagnosis that he begrudgingly began putting ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’ on my sicknotes instead of ‘exhaustion.’ Only the other day I mentioned to him that 88 gene abnormalities had been found in the blood of CFS patients and he gave a dismissive “Oh, really?” This is a man who watched me lose a stone in weight in two months, and who saw me so exhausted that I was unable to sit upright in a chair in his surgery.
What is it with these doctors? They are supposed to be helping people, right? Why the wilful ignorance? Grrr. At least I know that there are some doctors out there who take the illness seriously, and are trying to get to the bottom of the whole thing. Dr Kerr at St George’s university is getting close to developing a diagnostic blood test for ME/CFS. Maybe it won’t be too long before they come up with some sort of effective treatment. God knows there are people who need it.
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Um, there is effective treatment already. My book features over 250 medications and that’s just pharmaceuticals, many other things can be effective too. But yeah, I can definitely chime in with similar doctor experiences, but even more bizarre ones - the clinic for infectious diseases at the Helsinki university hospital that used to “treat” CFS/ME here (with steroids and antibiotics, sometimes antidepressants) has now decided that CFS/ME is cured by exercise and psychotherapy… sigh.
Kerr’s research is helping us find new treatments; the paper of his that grouped CFS/ME patients based on their symptoms and gene expression, and suggested treatments for each group. However most of those drugs are not yet available, but there are so many good treatments that are.