Doctors/treatment get poor grades from patients

In a survey of over 1300 CFS/fibro patients, eFibro reports 22% rated the current treatment they are receiving as poor, 38% as merely fair, 30% as good, and only 10% as excellent.

You can read that as 60% of patients being basically dissatisfied with their treatment, which probably means that 60% of patients feel they’re not getting noticeably better, which is a pretty sorry statistic for Modern Medical Science, which likes to pride itself on being able to cure the most dreadful diseases.

Part of the problem is that the treatment of CFS requires thinking outside the box, which is not something that’s taught in medical school.

I spent several years getting worse at the hands of MDs – I couldn’t have even rated their treatment "poor", because treatment was basically non-existent (in the first 3 years of this relapse, I took medication for less than 60 days: I repeatedly had to stop a prescription within a few days because it made me sicker, and then was required to wait weeks or months till my next appointment to get the prescription changed because the doctor's office would not take a message). And then they wondered why I wasn’t getting better when I had no medication?!

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, and especially not to doctors, that an untreated condition does not improve. Or that it gets even worse.

I finally gave up on that medical group (which advertised "innovative treatment", but didn't actually provide it) and went to a DO – osteopaths are a little better at creative thinking because of a slightly different school curriculum – and while he at least was open-minded enough to listen to me, he still didn’t have any answers that I didn’t already have myself. He was willing to experiment with prescriptions, but at that point, I’d deteriorated so far that this was like trying to dig my way out of a 50-foot hole with a teaspoon, so I’d have to rate the treatment as only fair because it wasn’t helping much; it certainly wasn’t getting me back to work. I needed drastic measures, and he didn’t have anything that could produce such spectacular results.

Then our local support group invited a guest speaker, a chiropractor who had become somewhat of an expert on CFS. Chiropractors get a very different curriculum than MDs and DOs, and this one hadextra training in nutrition to boot. He had an all-natural regimen that cost about the same as one prescription, and without the side effects. The 5 minutes I spent talking to him after the lecture is the only portion of my medical care in the past 7 years that I would rate as excellent, because it’s the part that did me the most good in the long run. He’s the only doctor among the dozen I’ve seen since 2000 who actually knew enough about CFS to do me some good. (For more information, a personal consultation, or to purchase the books and supplements, visit www.DrRodger.com ) Most of them knew nothing, but were convinced that they knew more than I did and therefore refused to listen to me. (In each case, when I finally found someone willing to prescribe what I had asked for initially, I improved, while the things they prescribed instead of what I asked for made me sicker.)

Nonetheless, we’re approaching a quarter century since the Incline and Lyndonville epidemics started and 20 years since CDC applied the name CFS to the disease, and there’s still no workable treatment available to patients (there are some anti-viral treatments which are, unfortunately, only available through clinical trials in a very limited number of locations). 100% of patients should rate THAT as poor.

Tags: CFS, dissatisfaction, doctors, treatment, poor, medication, rating, epidemic