Invisible Illness Week

From Service Dog Training

Blogging for Invisible Illness Week: A Disabled Person’s Response to the ‘House’ Effect

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32745079/ns/health-health_care/

The ‘House’ effect. According to the medical profession and the media, this is a problem caused by watching too many medical television shows. The symptoms? Going to the doctor with a complaint and expecting the doctor to listen to your thoughts on it and perform tests to determine what is causing the complaint. The ‘House’ effect is usually diagnosed in patients who think they know what is causing their symptoms and think it is something unusual. If the doctor cannot immediately find a common cause for the symptoms the patient is reporting, it is assumed to be the ‘House’ effect and the patient is told their symptoms are all in their head.

It’s that simple, right? If the doctors can’t immediately find something wrong with the patient, the patient is a hypochondriac. I can’t speak for everyone’s experiences with the medical profession, but I have been a victim of a ‘House’ effect diagnosis.

I injured my back in 2002. Originally I was diagnosed as having a strained muscle and put on a physical therapy regimen that involved running and forced stretching. I was curious why I had tingling and numbness in my left foot and lower leg from a muscle strain, but I did not question the diagnosis and went along with the physical therapy. I did not heal. In the 5 years that followed my injury, I never healed. Diagnoses were tossed around ranging from sprains, strains, herniated disks and sciatica to conversion disorder, borderline personality disorder, depression and addiction. I saw dozens of doctors, family practice doctors, orthopedists, neurologists and psychiatrists. I underwent interminable rounds of physical therapy which made me progressively worse. If I questioned the course of treatment, I was told I was just trying to get attention, looking for drugs, or was mentally ill. All the doctors I saw had one thing in common…at no time did any one of them actually listen to what I had to say. It was quite common, in fact, for doctors to simply walk out on me while I was asking a question or mentioning a new or worsening symptom. After a few years, I was pretty sure I knew what was going on with my own body, but every time I mentioned it to the doctors, it was blown off as impossible, without any testing to see.

Needless to say, 5 years after my original injury, I still didn’t have a diagnosis. Finally, I moved and was able to get away from not only my original doctors, but also from the medical records declaring me to be a malingerer and a drug seeker. Finally, I was able to start with a clean slate, and I insisted on a referral to a geneticist. I suggested the same diagnosis to him as I had to the other doctors. In 5 minutes he was able to do a quick screening in the office and confirm that I had been right all along. The diagnosis? Ehler-Danlos Syndrome, Type III.

This experience taught me something very important about the medical profession. What I learned was that the practice of medicine hasn’t advanced beyond the 1800’s. The science has advanced, yes, but not the way medicine is practiced. All through history, the medical profession has sought answers for physical phenomena they couldn’t explain with their current understanding of science. They have all come to basically the same answer. If it cannot be described by science, it must be mental illness, or in the early days of medicine, demon possession.

In fact, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, and irritable bowel syndrome among many other conditions were thought to be caused by mental illness, demon possession, stress or ‘female hysteria.’ More recently, diseases like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome were acknowledged by the medical profession to be more than the hypochondria of upper-middle class women. It is still common though, for people with very valid physical complaints to be diagnosed with hypochondria, psychosomatic diseases, or other mental health problems and later find out they have a physical illness that the doctors overlooked in their insistence that the problem must be mental.

Finally, is there a ‘House’ effect? Yes, of course. The ‘House’ effect occurs in doctors who never listen to patients, who don’t realize that many times their patients know more about their own bodies, and have done far more research than the doctor has. The ‘House’ effect occurs in every doctor who tells a patient “it’s all in your head” to avoid doing further testing or research. Is the patient always right? No, not necessarily. What doctors need to do is to exit the dark ages of the practice of medicine and realize that patients these days are more informed, more educated, and more confident than most people in the 1800’s. Doctors may say that performing the extra tests overburden the healthcare system, but what kind of burden does it place on the healthcare system when patients with chronic illnesses and conditions are not treated until they are so much worse their symptoms can no longer be denied? The ‘House’ effect is not a condition that afflicts the patient; it afflicts close-minded medical professionals who make their patients the victims of their lack of initiative and unwillingness to look beyond the routine.

--Tiffany Huggard-Lee 07:53, 14 September 2009 (CDT)