No doubt about it. Hypochondria is very REAL. My spouse (and as a result I) have dealt with it for 11 years now and its a real pain sometimes.

JT

http://www.anondo.alturl.com

This is a very funny story from Ms. Traig's book. Lighten up and enjoy it.

Just like how for every hypochondriac there's someone suffering from something real or obscure with vague and mysterious symptoms who can't get taken seriously by a doctor...

a friend of mine actually contracted scarlet fever in college.

She'd been feeling badly for weeks--fever, malaise, rash--and saw half a dozen doctors who couldn't figure out anything. Finally, one said "You're not going to believe this. I think you have scarlet fever." They thought she caught it from a younger family member--apparently pockets of outbreaks still occur occasionally in the rural south.

It's not about running up the bill so much as being able to say "we looked at everything we could think of". And no it's not bladder cancer or prostate cancer. That's not where the pain is localized. Best guess is that it WAS a stone that passed already. The thing is this: Instead of dicking around and sparing me a CT because of the radiation, they should just do it and short circuit the guessing.

Sure, it's a light-hearted article which has elicted several messages from health professionals who find it hilarious and who note they deal with hypochondriacs with some frequency, find them invariably irritating, and are glad to finally see the back of them when, presumably, they go in search of another doctor to irritate. I wonder how many of those "hypochondriacs" are then helped by doctors who take the time to discover whether there's actually anything physically amiss. I've been accused of "shopping for a disease" by a couple of doctors who I'm sure still believe I was just another irritating hypochondriac. Fortunately, I've been able to get real medical help elsewhere. But only after I've gone in armed with more and better information I had to get myself. I don't mind doing that, but I also am irritated by doctors who are irritated that I do it.

I've been floored by the accounts I've read over the past couple of months by women who've been sent home diagnosed as nervous nellies with panic disorder who then have heart attacks and even when they're sitting right in the emergency room are dismissed as hysterical hypochondriacs.

A couple of health professionals noted here that yes they'd rather deal with the "suppurating genitals" than a hypochondriac just as the author suggests, and that emergency rooms are for real emergencies such as heart attacks which they'd rather be left in peace to treat. Sure, but apparently even emergency room physicians often fail to recognize heart attacks in many people even as they're practically sitting in their laps.

So, yes, hypochondriacs, funny, worthy of derision, I guess. Physicians who don't have a clue? They're legion. And they're dangerous.

I hope it was just a stone, you are lucky if it is.

A visual inspection is what was needed to diagnose bladder cancer not a CT. Those expensive scans are just as good as the people looking at them - i have seen them do it and they do not take the time required to actually look at it and unless it is something large and obvious they will not notice it.

I felt the pain in my back so the location of the pain is not to be counted on.

If you are fine now, it was probably a stone. If not, have a urologist take a look.

I have Fibromyalgia, Moishe (and osteomalacia; osteoarthritis; a parathyroid deficiency; a small gallstone; multiple, large fibroids...)

Fibromyalgia isn't new by the way-only the name is. It used to be called fibrositis, and in other eras, it was known as muscular rheumatism, and it isn't any more simply because the nomenclature is inadequate and doesn't encompass the nature nor the whole gamut of symptoms that come with having this 'syndrome', as it tends to be referred to. The 'itis' for instance is supposed to indicate that there is inflammation but that is not the cause of the excruciating pain that is characteristic of Fibromyalgia (a silly name also). That's because Fibromyalgia is a neurotransmitter disorder (inflammation isn't necessarily present, and if it is, as it is with me, it's because of my osteoarthritis); there's something happening in the central nervous system of the Fibromyalgic that isn't happening in the central nervous system of a non-Fibromyalgic. So far studies show that the blood doesn't circulate properly in parts of our brain. But is the blood not circulating properly causing the Fibromyalgia, or is the Fibromyalgia (or the condition rather that is now called that) causing the blood to not circulate properly? As of yet nobody knows the aetiology of this condition or pathogenesis. The symptomatology is obvious, and MRI scans are showing abnormalities (even though blood tests do not), but what is causing them is not known, although there are many theories. And if the cause is not known then it can't be cured or alleviated. Since it's thought to be neurological (and neuromuscular) we are often asked to enumerate accidents we may have had that may have caused injury to our brain.

...Like that time when I fell off our rickety, woven wire fence that was too unstable for me to sit on but which didn't stop me from doing so all the same, and banged my forehead on the bitumen (which is what Adelaide's footpath's were made of until very recently). I remember it well as I had little pieces of bitumen still sticking to my forehead. I was a wee little thing and always falling. Then there was that car accident we had when I was eight. I was standing so I could look out the front window screen (I was very small), and therefore was not buckled, when the car spun round and I was thrown to the other side, near the passenger seat door. When I regained consciousness (for a while there, my father thought my sister and I were dead) I had a bump the size of a cone (and my sis had bitten her tongue...gawd how we laughed-at each other). Then there was that time (I was eight again) and my teacher's idea of sport was a game of chasey. I was running very fast (I was a fast runner), which the Italian males used to find threatening in a girl, and so one made it his resolve to catch me because I eluded them. He couldn't quite catch me long enough to tag me but somehow managed to push me, and being skeletal I flew onto the ground, and as he couldn't stop in time he fell on top of me, and all the other kids who were following behind fell too, one by one, and as each one fell my head was being hammered into the bitumen (that darn bitumen again!), like a nail being hit by a hammer. Does that qualify, Doc?

There's more. But, suffice to say, looking at the ways I caused injury to my head (which doesn't necessarily mean my brain was affected): whether I hit it hard, whether it was incurred as a result of a car accident. Or looking at whether my aches and pain occur during the day or during the night; or whether they are worse when I am supine or standing; or whether my symptoms become aggravated in summer or Winter seems to me as important for prognostication as whether at the time of my malady there was a flock of ravens flying by in the skies or I was facing East or West.

Similarly, calling the malady Fibromyalgia, or dysenergism syndrome as R. Paul ST. Amand does, makes no difference to me. I'll still experience and feel the agony, the lethargy, extreme fatigue, aches, and myriad symptoms that define this illness. Just as a rose by any other name will still smell like a rose, so Fibromyalgia will still be painful when called something else.

Fibromyalgia isn't a fad or a made-up phenomenon like the vapors. The college of Rheumatology has a set of diagnostic criteria to identify the syndrome, plus it's recognised by the World Health Organization and democratic governments, since it's hard to deny the data available now. With health care becoming expensive, and governments no longer wanting to pay disability payments to sufferers, in keeping with Neo-liberal ideology, it's of course in their best interest to deny such illnesses exist, and if they could get away with it, they would. Salon readers should be wary of those who express skepticism towards illnesses like Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue syndrome--it's on a par with the myth that there is a labour shortage. Besides, once upon a time, Diabetes sufferers-before the connection was made between insulin and the pancreas-who complained of being excessively thirsty were described as mad, obviously lunatics.

Alas, there are still bigots who judge just as quickly today.