Finally worked up the courage to see a doctor about my depression. My regular doctor was out so they had a fill-in doctor. An older lady. I said that I had been feeling depressed for a number of months and was willing to try an antidepressant again. (Previous ones gave me worse side-effects than the depression itself.)
She sighed and said “Well first we have to figure out what you’re depressed about.” That’s precisely the problem - I literally have nothing to be depressed “about”, it was just a constant thing. At that point I knew I was not getting help that day but carried on with the appointment.
She asked when it started. I said it actually began when I was 12…
“What happened when you were 12? Were you abused? What?!”
Um no, I’ve never been abused. My life circumstances at the time and also likely teenage hormones brought it on. Plus this is 30 years later.
A person I know well was having mood swings, sometimes deep depression to the point of suicidal tendencies, and was having great difficulty sleeping at night. This was in her mid- to late teens. The first medical doctor she consulted told her to get a night job and to take sleeping pills. Fortunately, she ignored this and sought other opinions.
She was eventually diagnosed, years later, with bipolar disorder and/or borderline personality disorder. She now takes a variety of medications prescribed by an excellent psychopharmacologist doctor, who monitors her condition closely and adjusts dosages as needed.
My breast cancer was found with a mammogram. I’d had a baseline when I was in my late 30s, then my primary said, “Well, it’s been a couple of years, let’s get you another one.”
I was 42 when I was diagnosed. So, yes, getting a mammogram is good advice.
A coworker came in to work late one morning, saying “I’m the world’s worst father.”
His kids had been playing on a trampoline the previous evening. Afterward, his younger son complained that his arm hurt. The arm looked OK externally, and the kid tends to be a bit of a drama queen (king?), so he didn’t think much of it. After listening to the boy bitch and moan all evening, he finally allowed that maybe something wasn’t right and off they went to urgent care. Yep - broken arm.
Per the data I linked to above, for every one of you that was saved from dying from breast cancer there are about 100 false positives, many of whom will experience invasive biopsies, and about five more that will have an unnecessary partial or full mastectomy.
And those statistics are based on women over the age of 50. The percentage of women harmed is even higher in younger cohorts.
My boss had actively tried to talk me out of getting flu shots and mammograms. “OK, if you want to get shot up with all that mercury, go ahead. If you want to go get hit with all that radiation, you just go ahead.”
Her mother had breast cancer in her eighties, and with good medical care she lived another couple of years after her diagnosis. I heard my boss attributing her survival to the fish oil capsules she had been feeding her mother. I also heard her giving advice to another employee whose mother had cancer, telling her to stop all treatment, radiation, chemo, whatever, and put her on only fish oil. She has no medical training or background. If I could I would have gotten her fired.
Real conversation I couldn’t get out of fast enough was with a woman who insisted that any physical symptom was emotionally based. Diarrhea wasn’t because I had IBS, it was because I had some experience or feeling I was trying to purge. Colds weren’t caused by a virus, they were caused by some unmet emotional need-- I forget all the details. Anyway, she promised me my IBS would go away if I’d get myself into therapy and figure out what emotion or memory I was trying to get rid of.
I almost hope she unrolled her theory for someone whose kid had cancer, and got punched (which doesn’t mean I wish cancer on someone’s kid; I just think this woman needs to get punched, and I can’t think of anyone better to do it).
A Chinese woman I know believes that if you bang a body part on something (e.g. barking your shins on a table), you should hit that body part even more in order to stimulate blood flow and prevent bruising.
On one occasion I had a sore throat and the doctor at the walk-in clinic gave me antibiotics for my “strep throat”. I got a rash on my torso and I went back to the clinic; this time the doctor gave me a different type of antibiotic. My rash got even worse, so I went to the emergency room. I waited three or four hours to see a doctor, then the doctor on duty looked at me for ten seconds and said “You have mono, stop taking antibiotics”.
These theories are of course bullshit, with one grain of truth. IBS has been strongly associated with anxiety and there are some compelling studies indicating that CBT can help to treat IBS. I wouldn’t say it’s an anxiety disorder but anxiety is certainly a factor in the cycle of agony that perpetuates itself to the detriment of our bowels. Actually, a lot of chronic illnesses have high comorbidity with depression and anxiety. People with depression and anxiety are physically sicker than those who are mentally healthy. It stands to reason that if you treat the problems of depression or anxiety you can mitigate the damage caused by chronic illness.
Yeah, but there are also diagnostic markers in blood tests for IBS, so there are objective tests for it. I have the threshold number of markers for it, which jibes with the mild case of it that I was diagnosed with years ago, before the blood tests were available. When my son was having a lot of diarrhea, we had him tested. He had just one marker, so he didn’t get a diagnosis, but he did get a note for school so he wouldn’t be sent home if he had a single instance of diarrhea with no fever.
Just having IBS can produce anxiety in and of itself. Imagine wondering what kind of day your bowels are going to have, making sure you are near a rest room all the time, and having lots of stomachaches. Plus having to put up with idiots who insist that it’s psychosomatic.
This woman was worse than most, though, because she didn’t go on about “anxiety”-- she insisted that there had to be a specific event, or memory, or relationship, or something I was trying to purge-- like maybe I hated my job, and if I quit it, I’d stop symbolically trying to purge it.
I had a mother who wasn’t happy if we didn’t leave the doctor’s office without a prescription. Sudafed was Rx when I was a kid, so sometimes my mother was mollified by codeine cough syrup and Sudafed (Actifed was the Rx name). But other times I ended up with antibiotics for what was probably a bad cold (albeit, I did have an unusual number of actual positive strep cultures), and so now I’m allergic to a lot of them.
I remember reading, years ago, about many doctors writing scripts for antibiotics for colds, specifically for people like your mother that wouldn’t leave unless they had a script in their hand. I don’t recall if it was a ‘this is why we have superbugs article’ or something else and IIRC, they made it sound like it’s still going on. In my mind, I’d rather they wrote scripts for something more innocuous, like say, some vitamins, but I’d bet these people equate “sick” with “I need antibiotics”.
Also, regarding your story above (sorta). I have a co-worker that has a bunch of standard “comebacks” (bad word for it, but it’ll work). In this case, when we’ve been at work for 8 or 10 hours and we’re all tired and just joking around, any time anyone says anything about an STD, he’ll always say “nah man, just get it twice and it cancels out”. There’s always someone (we usually have a lot of high school kids) that looks at him sideways and says ‘wait what…really!?’ and we both have to very quickly explain to them that no, please don’t do anything with someone that you know has an STD on the assumption that you can then go have sex with another person that has the same STD and it’ll go away. I know these are kids, but they’re all at least 16, I would have thought they’d know this by now.
OTOH, we’ve hired a lot of, let’s face it, really stupid people over the years.
My wife’s a 20 year (so far) BC survivor thanks to effective early screening so believe me when I say I understand your (ivylass’) perspective.
The truth is that some people’s lives are prolonged by years or decades by screening followed by treatment. Others are harmed, sometimes seriously and rarely fatally, by the screening itself or, more often, by the treatments triggered by the less-than-100% accurate screening.
From a public health perspective there’s no way to know which group any one person will be in when that person decides to take a screening test.
How many lives prolonged by how many years are needed to “pay for” how many disfiguring unnecessary mastectomies, unnecessary chemo-brains, radiation-induced secondary cancers, unnecessary heartache, and all the rest that statistically inevitably come along?
Damned if I know the answer. But the question of the tradeoff is 100% real. It’s not hypothetical. And that’s before we consider that the cost of the unnecessary harmful treatments are really added to the societal total “bill” for the necessary useful treatments given to the folks whose lives were prolonged.
Final comment about cancer in general. I would never use the words “cured” or “life/lives saved” in connection with severe degenerative illness in general or cancer in particular.
Following apparently successful cancer treatment one’s life is prolonged. For an indeterminate time. We hope it to be long. But we won’t know for sure until that life is over, whenever and however that may come to pass.
That’s my approach as well! Well, except for that severe heartburn I had after a few minutes of exercise for a couple of months. My wife ratted me out to my PCP who forced me into a checkup and heartlessly pushed me into a stress test. This led to a catheterization procedure and bypass surgery but I was SURE that the body would have taken care of itself!
