What does it mean?
What does it mean when anti-depressants make a CFS patient sicker but have no positive effect? Clearly, it means that CFS is not the same thing as depression.
What does it mean when the only medications that have shown uniformly positive results in research are anti-viral medications? Clearly, it means that CFS is not the same thing as depression.
What does it mean when a patient who asked for sleeping pills and pain pills and was given only anti-depressants gets worse on anti-depressants, but improves noticeably when finally given sleeping pills and pain pills? Clearly, it means that the patient has CFS, not depression.
It also means that doctors who were entrusted with treating the patient either didn't know or didn't care that their diagnosis and treatment were wrong. Research proved anti-depressants useless for CFS years ago. My doctors apparently had never read that research and were resistant to me telling them what I knew.
Instead of learning from the numerous CFS patients who report that anti-depressants don't help, a lot of doctors blame them for being difficult patients, instead of admitting the real problem is the doctors giving the wrong prescriptions.
CFS has some symptoms in common with depression. It has some symptoms in common with hypothyroid. It has some symptoms in common with AIDS. It has some symptoms in common with MS. But that does not mean that it is the same disease as any of those, because it also has symptoms that are not compatible with those diseases. Symptoms that one of my doctors said "don't make sense", because he couldn't fit them into the rubric of depression, and didn't recognize as being those additional symptoms that prove it's CFS instead. He simply assumed that I was confused and giving him bad information, instead of changing his diagnosis to fit the symptoms.
Had I received sleeping pills and pain pills when I first asked for them, instead of being wrongly prescribed anti-depressants, the odds are that I would have returned to work in a few months. Instead, 7 years later, I'm still not able to work full-time, and have been told I will never be able to work full-time.
Doctors will never admit it, but they don't always know everything. Sometimes they make mistakes. Sometimes they make tragic mistakes.
If you're not improving despite following doctor's orders, it means the problem is with the doctor, not with you. Don't let any doctor call you a "non-compliant patient" because he assumes you're not improving because you're not taking the pills. If the doctor blames you for not getting better, either stand up to the doctor and tell him he's the problem, or just go find another doctor who takes a different approach.
I didn't improve at all until I got away from the doctors with the fixation on anti-depressants, to someone who was open-minded enough to consider that if anti-depressants were making me sicker, then maybe he should try something that wasn't an anti-depressant. The sleeping pills helped, which the anti-depressants didn't.
CFS is a difficult illness for both doctor and patient. Doctors like to see miracle cures and feel ineffective if the patient doesn't recover quickly. I've been told that it takes at least as long to recuperate as it did to deteriorate. If you have not slept well for ten years, it will take ten years to erase the sleep deficit. So, every month that you're taking a prescription that doesn't help adds another month to your recovery. The doctor who expects that after half a dozen unhelpful prescriptions you'll suddenly bounce back to perfect health after one week on something that helps is being overoptimistic.
I'm improving slowly, now that I have the right pills, but any doctor who expects me to leap out of bed, go on a 10-mile hike this afternoon, and head back to work first thing Monday morning is clearly uninformed.
CFS is not a mental illness where a few days of pills can re-adjust abnormal chemistry and switch someone from extremely impaired to essentially normal. CFS is a physical illness where the body needs time to heal. Years of sleepless nights had left me with essentially no immune system. It took months of being on sleeping pills before my immune system kicked in again, and then it took 6 months of a 101 fever before the CFS virus was under control again. There are objective tests that, if they had been done, would have proven that in January of that year my immune system was far less functional than it was by December.
I didn't need a blood test to tell me that: one winter, I was horizontal all winter with sinus problems, and the next winter had hardly any difficulty with my sinuses at all. The following winter, without the experimental sleeping pills, I was not sleeping well, but was taking CFS/Fibro Formula (www.DrRodger.com) which kept my immune system functioning.
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