Functional Neurological Disorder is a common but poorly understood condition. Being diagnosed with Functional Neurological Disorder isn’t just overwhelming for you as the patient, but it also can be a challenge for your doctor as well. The symptoms look like neurological symptoms(each FNDer may have a different symptom set), but don’t have the usual causes…
Let’s start with the terms themselves. Systemic racism is a deep-rooted issue in the US, and one that many conservatives don’t want to admit even exists. When it comes to our broken healthcare system, racism is one of many ‘isms’ buried within it. Ableism is also a systemic issue, and one that is deeply entrenched…
I met Katie a year or two ago. As she and I discussed our health experiences, I found myself especially fascinated with how she discovered LDN and how helpful she’d found it. As she shared her experience of negotiating her treatment with her doctor, I thought it would be a great piece of experience to…
I have known RA Stone for a few years now, and when she offered to write a guest post for me, I jumped at the opportunity. She shares her experiences with medical gaslighting, a cause of medical trauma, in the post below. When I was eight years old, I had one of about a dozen…
On Tuesday, I had an appointment with a new neurologist. The neurologist I’d been seeing, Dr. Schneider, was on medical leave due to a cancer diagnosis. I’d had a telehealth appointment with Dr. Schneider in June, and he’d been a little pale and skinnier than usual (he was always a pretty slender guy), and during…
While I’ve talked about how the diagnosis process is one of guessing and checking, I want to emphasize that in most cases, it’s essential to have a doctor be involved in the process. We, as laypeople, don’t have access to all the information or tools needed to be in any way sure that our interpretation…
You and your doctor(s) can co-create a quality treatment plan. This includes not only the medical treatments, but also lifestyle changes.
I thought it might be helpful to take a few steps back and dig into how doctors are trained to think about and look at patients, and how they are trained to make diagnoses. This is really important because it helps us understand where missteps and mistakes are more likely to happen and to have…
Doctors can and often do make the wrong diagnosis. There are also people, especially those who spend a long period of time without a diagnosis, who start to see a diagnosis as a holy grail – that one true thing that will make their lives ok again. What a diagnosis is Diagnoses are labels. They…
If you are not experiencing an immediately life-threatening emergency, please double-check with your doctor if at all possible to see if there is a reasonable alternative to going to the ER. Not only are ER visits substantially more expensive than regular doctor or hospital visits, but they also are spaces where you have almost no…