Wessley and White at work again

[Annikki]

I thought I'd share this. It's a story from someone with another Wessely-derided autoimmune disorder and she informs us what they teach nurses and about "somatoform" disorders in school. I always wondered how doctors get indoctrinated into Wessely ideology in school.

http://www.speckblog.net/2006/10/06/something-happened/

Being Ill is Not a Character Flaw

Id like to tell you about my ... class, Abnormal Psychology.

Abnormal Psych is just fun. If there is something more enjoyable than whiling away the hours reading about the abnormal and why they do what they do psychologically, Id like to hear it. At the same time, for me its a bit of a catch-22.

In the last class we were discussing Somatoform Disorders, which are disorders of the body and include subsets like Hypochondriasis, Pain Disorders, and Somatization Disorders. All three are typically comorbid with anxiety or depression or both. A quick overview:

Somatization Disorders - Multiple problems; head, neck, stomach, whatever. May be exaggerating, but is not faking the problem. Primarily women. Do not voluntarily seek psychotherapy.

Pain Disorder - Nonimagined excrutiating pain. No apparent physiological basis for pain. Maladaptive - those with the pain become consumed by it and cease to hold relationships, work or parent effectively.

Hypochondriasis - Nonintentional: Sufferer is preoccupied with perceived abnormal functioning. Individual is distressed that testing does not confirm fears. Different from pain disorder and somatization in that there is no bodily or medical symptom.

Those breakdowns are directly from my notes, and all of them made me see blazing red. This class is a basic class for those going into nursing and/or psychology. Everyone in my class is entering one of those two fields. Im the only one in there not eventually destined to judge diagnose someone who enters a hospital or clinical setting.

Guess what everyone thought about me while I was waiting for a diagnosis for my interstitial cystitis? Guess.

Im going to try and organize this in such a way that its not just an outpouring of anger and scorn, and make sense of it. I tried to speak rationally class, but Im afraid that all that came out was blind rage. Ive tried to write this down several times but it just typically fell apart by the second paragraph into angry spluttering.

Doctors are neither omniscient nor infallible

That is a basic truth. If you are ill and something is wrong and eighteen doctors all tell you that they cant find anything and its all in your head, there is a distinct chance that they are incorrect and you are correct.

Even in the class textbook (where it still has Fibro and CFD as somatization disorders do NOT get me started on that) they talk about how there are people whove been diagnosed with these disorders and then later a new test was developed and WHOOPS! they actually are sick.

A sign of these somatoform disorders is comorbid depression and/or anxiety

Oh wait! You mean that someone who reports a chronic illness or long-term pain and is never believed gets depressed?? SHUT UP!

You dont fucking say, f***er's.

These people are highly agitated and get very angry when it is suggested that their illness is psychological and not physiologically based.

Being told youre a fucking liar when your insides are about to fall out of your body will do that. Its nice to know that if you take issue with the medical profession it just confirms their assertion that you must be mentally imbalanced.

Its also nice to know that I can object to this classification in the school setting and give everyone the opportunity to look at each other with raised eyebrows. Shes agitated! She must have a somatoform disorder!

These issues are primarily reported by women

And would you like to know why? Ill tell you why. Because womens insides are remarkably more complicated than a mans, what with the whole uterus and all, and far more cyclically active. It was only very recently, however, that womens issues were considered superfluous to medicine. After all, if the cow is giving milk, who cares if its in a little pain?

But its nice to know that were still teaching in classes that women are more prone to make shit up than men. Those poor, crazy bitches.

Clients rarely seek psychological help unless being encouraged by the medical community. Thus, these illnesses respond very poorly to therapy due to the clients unwillingness to accept that its a mental illness.

Or, you know, it isnt a mental illness.

If a medical doctor was treating someone with a pill and kept saying This pill wont work because of the patients unwillingness to be healed wed pull his license. But psychotherapists are allowed to continue to treat so-called somatoform illnesses with nothing but crappy results.

EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICES, PEOPLE. EVIDENCE-BASED.

So I brought some of these issues up with my prof yesterday. I pointed out that shes teaching future nurses and psychotherapists, and the distaste I saw on her face when she taught the class was the same distaste I saw in doctors when they would read my chart every time I entered the ER in excruciating pain. I asked her to correct the mistake in the book about Fibromyalgia and she agreed to hold a section on sensitivity when we get to the ethics portion of the subject.

Its better. Its not good, but its better.

God, the humiliation of having to ask for more pain killers is unimaginable. When you are in crushing pain 24 hours a day and the doc gives you a script enough for two Vicoden a day, each lasting four hours, what do you do? You take the two and mitigate some of the pain for eight hours and go sleepless and screaming through the next 16. And if you get a nurse or a professional who snits at you because how dare you ask for more pain meds? The impotent rage cannot be described.

I hate my illnesses, but I hate how I was treated by the medical community more. And I would like to state, for the record, that I never made it up. I never became a drug addict. I never quit my job or stopped parenting, or let my life end, even though sometimes I wanted to.

I DO NOT HAVE A SOMATOFORM DISORDER, and Im guessing neither do you.

 

[Graham]

Hi Annikki

No wonder that person was spitting blood!

I will read just about anything, and I did go through a phase of reading all sorts of medical "histories". It's amazing how many major discoveries were made and pretty conclusively proved, but rejected for years by the medical profession. It's pretty much like the church believing that the Earth was the centre of the universe. There are so many examples - from infection in childbirth transmitted by surgeons' hands to bacteria causing the majority of stomach ulcers. But the longest-running one is that on the need for vitamins and minerals. Our ignorance on these is astounding: all we really know is what can kill us, either minimum or maximum amounts, but no real idea about what we need for optimum health.

Sir William Osler is often called the father of modern medicine, and his most famous quotation is "Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis." Sounds like my kind of doctor.