http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/health/29chemo.html?th&emc=th
Many CFS/fibro patients complain about mental fogginess, and this has been brushed off in the same way as their illness is brushed off.
Apparently, cancer patients have the same problem, and are also brushed off by doctors when they complain about it.
According to this NY Times article "approaching a doctor does not guarantee help. Susan Mitchell, 48, who does freelance research on economic trends, complained to her oncologist in Jackson, Miss., that her income had been halved since her breast cancer treatment last year because everything took longer for her to accomplish.
She said his reply was a shrug.
“They see their job as keeping us alive, and we appreciate that,” Ms. Mitchell said. “But it’s like everything else is a luxury.”
Another patient described getting sidetracked from one chore with another, “I have an almost childlike inability to follow through on anything,” Ms. Lowen said. Again, something very familiar to most CFS/fibro patients.
Being able to think may seem like a "luxury" to doctors who are focused on life or death, but it's not a luxury to a patient who has repeatedly been told by a Disability Judge "you look healthy, go back to work". If you cannot stay on-task, you can't work. If you cannot remember what you're supposed to be doing, you can't work. Even menial manual labor requires a few functioning brain cells so you can learn the simple repetitive task; for a fogged-in patient who cannot even remember what to do with the toothbrush that she's used every day for decades, it's asking too much to remember how to do something she's just been taught.
The doctor may think he's succeeded by keeping you alive, but not if you wind up dead of exposure or starvation because you cannot work to pay for rent and food and are denied Disability benefits because the judge cannot "see" the fog that prevents you from working.
You'll hear CFS patients struggling to remember their own names. My parents have lived in the same house my entire life ... at my worst, I had to look up their address because I couldn't remember it. Yet when I did poorly on a memory test in the Mental Status Exam, it was written off as inaccurate becausethe evaluator could not believe that this score could be legitimate. #1, he didn't know that this was precisely what the tests should show for a CFS patient in severe relapse, and #2, he didn't realize that I was thrilled to have remembered even the few things that I got right.
Dr. Sheila Bastien, who has examined many CFS patients, found CFS fog to be "worse than traumatic brain injury" cases in litigation. So there is proof that it's there, but like so many other things about CFS/fibro, there are also people who don't want to acknowledge it as truth no matter how much proof exists, because this would force them to challenge their beliefs about CFS/fibro.
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