Long Term Glandular Fever

Doctors

Doctor says: "I'm sorry Mr Chapman, I can't find anything wrong with you."

Doctor thinks: o O (...well nothing that I can cure).

  When I was younger I was really impressed with doctors, you were ill, you went to the doc and you were cured in a few days, great. Now I see that the medical profession is not quite as advanced as they, and perhaps we, would like to believe. We only have some very basic cure-alls, (and they will not last us at the rate at which we are prescribing them).

  I really don't mind a doctor saying that he cannot cure me, they are not Gods and our knowledge is limited. I however have become fed up by the suspicion, and reallocation of blame which usually follows a incomplete diagnosis. You can't tell people they are not ill when they patently are, and further, you can't argue with abnormal blood tests and physical symptoms that you can see right in front of you. This reaction seems to me to be so bloody ignorant as to beggar belief.

  'Stress' is then blamed for many currently non-diagnosable diseases, (such as IBS). Many of these are in my opinion due to parts of the body losing their function for physical reasons and the problem only coming to light when the body is put under an increasing workload.

  My father used to say that when he was young his asthma was dismissed as being psychosomatic, but this reaction didn't stop him suffering from it and it didn't address his physical symptoms. Now we should know better. But do we? A member of the Asthma Association told me that they still have trouble with some members of the medical profession even today. So I ask you: what hope does the CFS sufferer have?

  Doctors, with an ever increasing contempt for their patients become even more condescending when they find that the patient has been seeking 'alternative' therapies. It is blindingly ironic then, that it is the arrogant and unfeeling nature of the profession which caused many of the patients to seek out alternative forms of treatment in the first place. There is nothing like telling someone to "pull themselves together", that, "they are quite well really", or imply that they don't want to get well, to make patients feel angry and alienated, especially when they are demonstrably ill, and clearly trying everything they can think of to get themselves better.

  Another catch-all 'excuse of a diagnosis' is depression. Of course many people are ill prepared to cope with their own lives, but the increasingly over prescribed Prozac is at best a simple cover up (of underlying causes), and at worst a mask, hiding the body's desire for curative rest.

  Drug interaction is another topic which makes me really angry. Until recently I used to take a mouth full of erithromycin and terfenadine twice a day, (strange how my body got me to get an ECG done during this time isn't it?). It has taken years for the information about the interaction of these two drugs on your heart rhythm to come to light, and even now it is claimed that it only affects the old or infirm, when in reality it's just that the rest of us are too healthy to notice.

The Medicine

The reason this happens is partly due to the financial system that drug companies work within, and partly due to the terrible feedback of information to them from doctors. If you are going to do what amounts to mass drug trials on the populous, the sheer volume of numbers and genetic diversity almost guarantees that there will be bad interactions between people and drugs, and between drugs for different aliments. The very least you can then do is to feed any and all negative (or indeed positive) information about interactions back to the makers. My father had an amazingly back reaction to a certain new combination of blood pressure tablets, the symptoms of which ceased, never to reappear when the drugs were changed back. I don't care how anecdotal this kind of report is, the point of this story is that no information whatsoever on this reaction was passed back to the drug company who made it. This is madness!

All I want an open minded medical profession, who listen to what the patient is telling them and are not too proud to say when they cannot help. While myself and three members of my family have been seriously let down by the medical profession, I have to say in closing that I have found a few practitioners whom I still respect to this day. They were the ones who were not afraid to say:

"Yes, James you've got a disease like CFS, but no I can't cure you".

A page from James David Chapman's website. Located at: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~jchap/ Site mirrored here at: http://www.j.chap.btinternet.co.uk
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