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What is your attitude to Western medicine?

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Comments

  • #62
    Graces7
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 32,634 ✭✭✭✭Graces7


    Widdershins wrote: »
    My thoughts: medicine from a traditional chinese herbalist and it cured my friend's chronic indigestion/reflux that was causing him to choke on food. He still gets it now and then if he tries to eat in a noisy environment but on a much less serious scale.

    Modern medicine is invaluable for what it can do but it can't do everything and it is mostly symptom based so it often can seem like tackling a symptom and never treating the cause.

    Another thing. Many diseases are really hard to diagnose. Sometimes when drs are at a loss, they jump to the conclusion that it's psychosomatic and there's nothing a patient can really do about it. That's the limit of their expertise so ''it's all in your head''. I find that sad. So I would look to alternative therapies if western medicine fell short for me. That's why people who sneer at them seem a bit ignorant to me.

    Too late to multiquote, agreeing with Graces7 that DrGoogle doesn't necessarily predict death no matter what and will mention slippery elm lozenges to friend!

    Thanks.
    I am very upset today as had a diifcult encounter with a local GP

    That is what happened to me. Within three weeks of a severe physical collapse I was l sent off to a psych and that was the end of any physical testing or care.

    I saw my notes after a long battle and one locum GP years on had seen me and commented that I had many real physical symptoms he could not account for. As i did . Measurable ones too!!!

    When they take that attitude , then they dope you and that in itself masks symptoms and causes side effects that exacerbate conditions

    When i finally got the diagnosis of M.E, thirty off years on, in the UK , the doctor I managed to find after being what they call a "peripatcic patient "for months, took a full history for the first ever time.

    Then without hesitation wrote across my notes. "Never mentally ill; was always M.E."

    And I left the UK for good.

    And I have an utter horror of drs now . Been brutalised too often and was very glad I did not live in the town where Harold Shipman was working!

    I am not alone ; people with m.E have been ill treated many years. Like the wee lad whose mother was told he was not really paralysed; all in his head. They threw him into a swimming pool and he sank as his M.E Paralysis was real. Mum watched then of course jumped in after him.

    So by all means trust the drs but please do not expect folk like me to do so or discredit us when we do not. That is to further the abuse.

    Many herbal remedies are great.


  • #63
    Academic
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 445 ✭✭Academic


    Graces7 wrote: »
    Not in the UK on the NHS as an ordinary person. You get sent off with a prescription pdq . Lived like that and the description is perfect ..

    He didn't say "UK medicine." He said "Western medicine." That's the issue.

    Cheers,

    Ac


  • #64
    qo2cj1dsne8y4k
    Closed Accounts Posts: 23,646 ✭✭✭✭qo2cj1dsne8y4k


    I have epilepsy and profound hypothyroidism so unfortunately I'm on regular medication for the rest of my life. I am personally grateful for our western medicine, I was so sick last year before they eventually realised I was in myxodema stage of hypo, and the Drs and endocrinology team have taken such great care of me I finally feel like I have my life back, thanks to a few little pills every morning.

    I think the vast majority of us are very lucky. Get an infection? A few days of antibiotics and you'll be feeling better. My dad had cancer and they were amazing with wjatvthey could do in regards to treatment and then in the final days of his life.

    For someone in their final days, I'm so glad we have such amazing palative care available for the sickest.


  • #65
    Jawgap
    Closed Accounts Posts: 20,296 ✭✭✭✭Jawgap


    Graces7 wrote: »
    Then you were very very lucky and blessed indeed. And that was not my experience ; only wish it had been. And know many who were treated as negligently and wrongly as I was. In tears here by the way. So many memories of abusive and negiigent drs whose conduct robbed me of my career and nearly my very life.

    Especially glad for you as there were children involved.

    And of course this was years later than I was there?

    I will remain quietly outside the "care" thank you, and my family overseas know my needs and have both my Power of attorney and my wishes for my care. Backed by our Barrister who knows what I went through. .

    Comes to something when that is the only way an old lady can feel safe from abuse!

    I don't think we were especially lucky (perhaps you were unlucky, or it was a bit of both - some good luck for me, not so good for you)...... for example the GP I had treated my tendinitis by getting a gait analysis done. I think, in my experience, you have to be a 'good' patient and speak up for what you want (I'm not suggesting you didn't) - if you go in and you get a pill for your ill without saying "hang on, is this the only treatment option available" then there's some culpability there. In the case of my GP, on that occasion, I said I didn't want anti-inflammatory medication I wanted to know the cause and the cure........he obliged by arranging a gait analysis and had me bring my football boots to the next appointment whereupon he produced a scalpel and showed me how to shape the achilles notch on them.


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