"Is It All In Your Head?" NO!

There was an interesting article in the latest Reader's Digest about the 5 most understood illnesses in Canada called "Is It All In Your Head?". Number 1 was Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and number 2 was Fibromyalgia. So I wanted to give you a little summary of the article to give you a glimpse of the frustrating reality of over 300,000 lives in Canada, including mine.

1. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
It begins by recapping a person's story and I loved how she expressed the extreme fatigue and pain she experienced; she described saying, "walking from the bedroom to the kitchen felt like walking across the Sahara". She was quickly diagnosed with CFS but her doctor had no idea how to help her. She remembers "My doctor basically said 'I can't help you.'" (I've heard that from more than 1 doctor as well.) The article continues by providing general info about CFS explaining how patients are often sent to psychiatrists because physicians don't know what to do with them. Patients still also "face physicians who are not well-informed about the debilitating nature of their illness" and simply think it's too "time consuming and difficult to treat and diagnose." (I was blessed with a very caring doctor in Windsor, and very knowledgeable doctors while in England.)

2. Fibromyalgia
The article describes how "the mainstream medical community is at odds over whether Fibromyalgia is an actual condition. Sufferers usually appear perfectly healthy when examined because there are no laboratory tests to support or discredit symptom testimony." This results in doctors, again, sending their patients to psychiatrists. "When doctor's don't understand a condition, they always make this leap to the head." The problem continues with drug companies that "engage in the most egregious type of marketing and disease-mongering". The medical test that is now widely accepted is the "tender points test" (which was how I was diagnosed) but this again relies on the patient's testimony and results in grave misdiagnosis, unfortunately resulting in the real sufferers (like myself) being lumped into the wrong category. Because there is generally no consensus, patients are often left to come to their own conclusions and figure out how to treat their illness on their own. One patients says "I think it's sad that after all these years, we have to jump through hoops to prove ourselves". (Trust me, I understand...)