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(Continue Reading)

TheNib.com

@thenib

THIS!!!

The Continue Reading link is somewhat small so I just wanted to point it out i the OP so people don’t just stop at this point of the comic.

SUPER relatable, but the rest is so important.

This is one of the many many reasons why I don’t fuck with anti self diagnosis people. Half the time, if you don’t go in with a thorough understanding of what’s happening to you and what you should be tested for, doctors will just write it (and you) off.

Ok. First of all you have to understand there’s a rule every doctor will use, and what they teach us first year of college: the most common diagnosis it’s probably the correct diagnosis. There’s lots and lots of illnesses that have common symptoms, and if you stop to consider every possibility, you will end up in an infinite loop in which chances are you will never get a conclusion. If you experience weight lose, tiredness and are a young woman, probably it’s an eating disorder. If this is note the case and you insist, then, yes, the doctor must reconsider. But please, don’t rely on self-diagnosis or profesionals that are not doctors (“sleep therapist”??). It may have worked for you, but let me tell you it was totally a coincidence, and spreading this type of ideas it’s harmful for a lot of people. Doctors are human, they usually overwork and are pressed by unnecessary bureaucracy. It’s not that they don’t care, as everybody insists on saying, it’s that they can’t stop to consider every possibility and care about every patient like it was their son, as bad as it sounds.

• Self-diagnosis =/= getting to know your body and what feels wrong with it.
• Other “professionals” that aren’t common doctors and that seem to care more about you bc a)you probably are paying them a huge amount and b)they don’t have as many patientes as a common doctor =/= the fucking solution to your illness. Don’t spread harmful ideas.

It is literally a Doctor’s job to figure out what is wrong with you and ensure you get treatment. That is literally their job. It is just downright lazy to spend five minutes looking at somebody’s symptoms and then anounce you know what it is, even after they repeatedly tell you it’s not. It’s also incredibly dehumanizing and disrepsectful to the patient, who knows their body, who knows something is very wrong, to tell them

The problem isn’t that the perso who made this comic went to the Doctor once and that GP at first glance assumed the obvious. The comic clearly shows a very real problem with GPs and other medical practitioners following 

Honestly the gall it takes to say that weight loss + young woman = eating disorder is a reasonable diagnosis to make is astonishing, and is precisely the problem with medicine practice at present. Jumping to the conclusion that somebody has an eating disorder based only on the fact they are a young woman, and they have experienced weight loss, requires a stagering amount of stereotyping and dismissiveness, not to mention, not doing your job as a Doctor at all. The prescence of weight loss and the fact the patient is a young woman is not nearly enough to reach a diagnosis of an eating disorder. That diagnosis requires that the patient has low self-esteem, is obsessive about their weight and views themself as fat, ugly, or undersirable, and it requires disordered eating, and it requires – NONE OF WHICH ARE SYMPTOMS THE PATIENT IS DISPLAYING. It is a completely inaccurate diagnosis based solely on the misogynistic assumption that most young women have low self esteem and therefore any young woman experiencing weight loss probably has an eating disorder.

If she had an eating disorder, why would she would go to the Doctor to say “I’ve experienced rapid weight loss and I don’t know why it’s happening!” ??? That makes absolutely no sense, and is a testament to the mental gymnastics required to be this lazy about your job.

Diagnosing people with mental illnesses, or dismissing their symptoms by saying “you’re just stressed out” or “it’s probably nothing to worry about” without first investigating physical causes, is completely irresponsible practice. If you first rule out physical causes, and it turns out they have a mental illness, then at least you have ruled out other possibilities and the patient feels listened to and taken seriously. If you diagnose someone with a mental illness without first ruling out potential physical causes, you could be letting a physical problem get worse and go untreated while they are getting useless therapy for a mental problem they don’t have. More to the point, most of these dimissive “diagnoses” never lead to anything. It’s not as if Doctors are diagnosing people with mental illnesses then referring them to mental heath professionals who can draw up plans for effective treatments and therapies. It’s literally “you’re probably just depressed” or “i think you’ve got anxiety” and then sending them on their way. Again – highly irresponsible practice to say the least.

The it happens literally all the time. It happened to the person who made this comic. It is not an uncommon occurance. People – most often women – who have chronic illnesses, especially autoimmune disorders, are repeatedly dismissed, ignored, stereotyped, and sent on their way and left to suffer for years as their conditions worsen and potentially become life-threatening. Irreversible damage can be done. All because Doctors are too fucking lazy to actual investigate what is actually going on and find solutions, which is literally their job.

I appreciate that chronic underfunding is a problem. Being a doctor is an incredibly stressful job. I appreciate that. But none of that excuses this repeated issue of dismissing and ignoring patients, stereotyping them, and releasing them with little to no attempts at actually diagnosing and treating their problems.

Nobody is expecting that Doctors care about patients as though we are your children. What we are expecting is to be treated with dignity; not to be dismissed and ignored, not to have to fight tooth and claw just to be taken seriously. That to be treated like a human being with a problem that needs solving, is not the norm, demonstrates that there is a pretty serious fundamental flaw in the way medicine is operating currently.

Literally every person with a chronic illness I have ever encountered experienced years of being doubted by Doctors, being ignored, brushed off, or told they are exaggerating, they’re attention-seeking, or “depressed” or “anxious”. We have to become our own advocates. We have to figure things out for ourselves, then go back to our Doctors and convince them to take us seriously, convince them with a pile of evidence that we aren’t faking, that we are suffering, that there are diagnoses out there that explain our dizzying array of symptoms.

(And as an aside – what, exactly, is it that you find so ridiculous about a Therapist who specializes in sleep disorders? Are sleep disorders not worthy of attention by the psychiatric community? What makes them less qualified to assess somebody with sleep-walking problems than a GP??)

Another problem with saying that it’s “just depression” or “just anxiety” is that more and more doctors are discovering that depression or other mental health issues can be a symptom of a physical problem. If there is something wrong with your heart for example, it can cause depression and/or anxiety. Calling it “just depression” and sending someone on their way does nothing to address the underlying physical cause of the depression.

There’s also nothing stopping someone with actual anxiety, depression, an eating disorder, etc from also having a very real and potentially dangerous medical condition unrelated to it at the same time.

The practice of considering physical symptoms to be psychosomatic the moment certain psychological diagnoses show up in a medical file can kill. ‘A feeling of impending doom’ or ‘a feeling something is dangerously Not Right’ is a common heart attack symptom.

Lucky for a member of my family her doctor listened when she presented with worries beyond the background anxiety he was already treating her for and a highly controlled heart condition that hadn’t caused issues in years – he had her admitted for cardiac observation fast enough that when the heart attack proper hit she was already in the ICU.

Medicine’s Women Problem