Comments on: Fas times at inflammation high

By: Mistress Krista

Mistress Krista — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:34:35 +0000

Sara: If you have had great doctors, that’s awesome. Ideally that should be all our experience! However, the reality is that many folks have symptom-focused medical care. I’ve experienced it, and so have family and friends. Just like every profession there are good ones, bad ones, lots of mediocre ones, and a handful of great and awful ones.

By: Sara Anderson

Sara Anderson — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 18:21:08 +0000

I’ve been diagnosed with a form of MS, so I’ve been researching this kind of thing for the past 2 years(as a pretty darn smart layperson), and I think this theory is about to go from crackpot to mainstream.

And I want to know who all these terrible doctors are that never think systematically. I lucked out with a particularly good GP, but a lot of trashing of mainstream medicine doesn’t add up with my experiences. Specialists can be that way, most definitely.

I’m in a quasi-medical field, so doctors tend to assume I can keep up with their thought processes, and it kind of gives me an uncommon advantage in my medical care.

By: Alicia

Alicia — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:26:01 +0000

Interesting. Thanks for sharing! Considering how patient my doc is with me saying “I read it online” I bet he’d love to see some studies. :)

By: Mistress Krista

Mistress Krista — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:21:22 +0000

Alicia: I suspect that the average doctor does not. For one thing, doctors are rarely trained to think systemically — they are trained to think symptomatically. Consequently they often conceptualize diseases or symptoms as isolated, discrete events. This has prevented us, for example, to make progress on broader concepts such as “cardiometabolic risk” — in other words, the idea that heart disease and diabetes are manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon. Because, y’know, heart disease is fat and diabetes is sugar, so they can’t possibly have any relationship. They also tend not to grasp patients as emblematic of their environments and genetic histories. I think this is really due to the type of training.

However, you can help your doctor to do his/her job. For one thing, compiling a very clear written list of your symptoms and signs is extremely useful. Doctors are often frustrated by people coming in with vague complaints and forgetting pieces of relevant information. Getting it all on paper helps them identify connections.

Second, while this may piss doctors off, bringing clinical studies in to show them can be quite useful (especially if you have more than one). I’ve sent my father to his doc with data on statins and muscle damage, and she was forced to acknowledge that his unusual calf injuries could be related to all the statins she’s prescribing, so they are working together to lower the dosage. Family docs don’t have a lot of time to keep current on the journals, so helping them be aware of new research can also assist them.

The more you can understand your own situation, the better. Then you can help other people understand you.

By: Alicia

Alicia — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 02:09:00 +0000

Krista, do you have the sense that the average practicing physician understands these relationships?

I’ve just started learning about chronic inflammation recently, but my own doctor hasn’t hinted that he sees it connected with my obesity. (In fact, I had to push hard to get him to allow a leptin test, because he didn’t have a course of treatment to follow if it came back too high, which it did.) I know it takes a while for medical research to make its way into general practice, but I don’t know how long.

What are your thoughts?