Fear Based Medicine - Who is responsible for your health?

Just who knows your body best?

I'm guessing or rather hoping that the answer to that question is you - the reader.

Yet we are all too willing to hand over the power of what we should do with our bodies to our doctors. A person who never really knows us when we are well so making a comparison isn't easy for them and not all illnesses are obvious.
We go along and have the tests, and wait to see if they fit the 'normal range' - well that we didn't know before. You might always have been outside the normal range and perfectly healthy.
Your blood pressure gets checked, it may be the first time in years and again, what if normal for you, would be outside the 'normal range'
Now of course a doctor needs some guidelines to work within, but that is all they are - guidelines! They are not gospel and you, like many, could one that doesn't fit the norm.

This of course is all fine as long as you are then not coerced onto a medication route without discussion and with the understanding that there are other options that may work better or could run along side a medical route that would improve your health greatly. Plus the consideration that you are functioning well but outside the 'normal range' Normal for you.

It seems that more and more people are becoming fearful of the one person who should be there as a partner in your health improvement and not an ogre who will cast you aside if you don't comply.

As Dr Patrick Kingsley says, when you visit the doctor, don't ask the doctor what he can do for you, but ask him what can you do to help yourself.

So what happens when you visit your doctor?

I hope not the same as a case I heard recently which is just an example of the scenario I hear all to often.
Sadly it is arrogance and ego that get in the way of true medical support and I use the word support specifically.

If you see a doctor and want to know what the root cause of a problem is - is that unreasonable?

Is it ok to have just the symptoms treated forever, as is very often the case with back pain and many chronic illnesses.

The one thing for certain is that if you take the amount of pain killers needed every day to keep the pain under control, the stomach will need another pill to help the acid level and the liver will eventually need help as will the kidneys.

Pain is there for a reason - not to be masked but to alert the conscious body to a problem that needs fixing.

It is disturbing that when patients want to know more or question the treatment or suggest that they try a different route, then some doctors are showing their disapproval and implying that if the patient won't follow their advice then there is no point coming to see them.

Now to some extent, i can see where the doctor is coming from, but perhaps the issue is not so clear cut and if patients are asking about different routes to health, then perhaps it is time that doctors started to familiarise themselves with other routes to health and start to work in partnership with what patients want.
We are so conditioned to go to the doctor with health problems in the first instance, that we expect it to be our one stop shop, so perhaps patients feel they need the approval of their doctor before they seek help elsewhere - that is because we have been brought up with a cradle to grave mentality to the NHS and our health

So when you ask a doctor what else can be tried or investigated and they come back with amytriptaline, an addictive antidepressant and you don't want to take it - fear is instilled in you -

But we end up with more and more drugs - there are so many that far from being a pill for every ill, we are perhaps in the realms of an ill for every pill!

People worry what the doctor will say if they don't comply with the advice, but what when the advice doesn't sit comfortably with you? many feel worried to go back and ask the doctor again, they know doctors are busy so we tend to be passively accepting yet you are the keeper of your body and it has got to serve you and not the doctor.

If you find yourself unwell, unless it is a life threatening emergency of which our NHS are brilliant at, don't be rushed into a route, take time and consider what is best to achieve health and not just squash symptoms, don't be rushed into something through fear.

If a body gets sick, we have to find what caused that to happen and only then can we start to change the body back to health.

CAM therapists are fortunate in that they have longer with patients to determine the root cause and work up from the problem, not 10 mins to make a diagnosis, what ever form of treatment you take,  don't make a decision on a fear base.