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Diagnoses of Convenience
(Have you been pegged?)
[href: And what does this have to do with personal detox?]
Beware Your Disempowerment
If you (or someone you care about) are among the millions of people – mostly women – who have been to many doctors and endured expensive and humiliating testing to seek relief for symptoms of fatigue, lethargy, abdominal pain, weight gain, joint pain, itching, skin problems, increasing allergies and sensitivities, mood swings, various digestive-related complaints, and many other symptoms...
And if they've given you a diagnosis that may or may not include one of the following: Epstein-Barr virus, irritable bowel syndrome, depression, premenstrual syndrome, perimenopause, rheumatoid arthritis, and then prescribed pills that relieve some of your symptoms, but that certainly have not brought you back to the state of health you were in before you began having this problem...
Or if they've given you a diagnosis that includes the word "idiopathic," meaning "of unknown cause;" (notice the similarity of the root word between idiopathic and idiot).
Or if they've given you a referral to a psychiatrist, because after all, psychosomatic illness can't be healed by their branch of the medical field...
Then you may have become a victim of the diagnoses-of-convenience syndrome that plagues the medical profession today.
That diagnosis may be medical mumbo-jumbo to disguise the fact (from you) that they really don't know what's wrong, but unless they call it something, the insurance company won't pay for treatment (they figure you can't afford to pay out-of-pocket). This is really to say that your problem falls outside of the doctor's medical paradigm, which he or she is not going to question for your sake, because, after all, the credibility of his or her entire medical education is at stake, and the good doctor is not going to risk that sort of professional disorientation for the sake of the health of a patient or two (too bad it's you).
The Medical Establishment is Geared to Diseases, Not to You
First, we'd like to let you know that although the diagnoses-of-convenience problem is prevalent, and will be for quite some time, there are doctors who are looking behind the "curtain" and who are finally asking the right questions, and breaking out of their paradigm to actually help people who fall through the cracks of the rest of the medical establishment. (After we've introduced you to a couple of them, then we'll go over what some of these diagnoses are and how the symptoms can be alternately interpreted and the tests that are needed to obtain an accurate diagnosis.)
One of our favorites is Sidney McDonald Baker, M.D., author of Detoxification & Healing: The Key to Optimal Health. He writes: "It is not a lack of science that has retarded the blossoming of a medical practice focused more on individuality. It has more to do with the inertia of a medical hierarchy that yields slowly to change and the strong investment of various levels of the hierarchy in treating diseases, not individuals.
It is not just that doctors think in terms of diseases, but that a whole structure of fund raising, allocation of resources for research, reimbursement for medical care, medical education and specialization is based on the idea that diseases exist in nature as fixed entities. We do not need to give up the idea of diseases nor yield to the understanding that our picture of disease is a transient artifact of our limited ways of seeing groups of individuals. We can begin to improve on our system for taking care of individuals, with or without having a name for their disorder, by applying a simple strategy for problem solving. I invite you to consider such a way of thinking about any chronic complaint that you may develop, whether your chronic symptoms fall neatly into a diagnostic category or whether your symptoms cannot quite be summed up under a given disease name." (Page 123)
In his (now out-of-print) book (href: What Your Doctor Didn't Learn in Medical School-Your Guide to the Most Frequently Misdiagnosed Illnesses,) - href to note that out-of print books can be found through internet-based services (Amazon, others?) the late Stuart M. Berger, M.D., states: "Some practitioners still subscribe to the old "If-I-can't-test-for-a-problem-it-isn't-there" attitude. To an extent, that is just the reasonable caution of a physician who is taught to distrust what he cannot see. When that attitude helps avoid needless, dangerous treatments, it is a good and useful one. But when it blinds us to what is right in front of us, including our patients' suffering, it does nobody any good." (Page __)
Yeast Infections
The most common ailment that this attitude pertains to is systemic yeast infections. Tens of millions of people in the U.S. are suffering from the effects of yeast infections. These infections are often caused by overuse of antibiotics. Antibiotics are truly life-saving drugs that should be saved for life-threatening conditions. Taking them for every sniffle can bring on a yeast infection because antibiotics also kill off the body's friendly bacteria which normally keep Candida yeast microbes in check. Yeast infections are also a common side-effect of taking birth-control pills.
Dr. Berger refers to a yeast infection as polystemic chronic candidiasis, or PCC. PCC is an overgrowth of yeast cells. Candida albicans is the primary yeast variety that causes problems. These bacteria are everywhere in our environment, so escaping them is impossible. In a normal healthy individual, these cells are controlled by other "friendly" bacteria that exist primarily in our abdominal tracks.
As Dr. Berger says, "...sometimes, in what is termed Candida overgrowth, the yeast breaks out of local infections and goes on a rampage, an out-of-control riot. Under certain biological conditions in your body, Candida changes from a simple, relatively benign yeast form into what is called a mycelial fungal form.
In that state, it begins to spread out from its usual niche in your gastrointestinal tract, sending out tentacle-like growths into the walls of your intestines, where it can come into direct contact with your bloodstream. Once in contact with the blood, yeasts can liberate chemical waste products from their reproduction.
Now, those yeast by-products may help a cake rise, but they don't help your bloodstream. In fact, it is believed that these products act like toxins, creating serious symptoms in virtually every system of your body. Hence the wide and bewildering range of symptoms attributed to yeast infections." (Page 108)
Here's Doctor Berger's list of symptoms of PCC:
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Fatigue
Lethargy
Depression
Inability to concentrate
Headaches
Skin problems
Difficulty breathing
Vaginitis
Joint pain/swelling
Vaginal burning or itching
Rectal pain or itching
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Psoriasis
Hyperactivity
Cramps and abdominal pain
Diarrhea
Gas
Bloating
Coated tongue
Muscle cramps/aches
Muscle weakness
Lowered sex drive
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Some of the diagnoses of convenience that medical doctors and psychiatrists ascribe to these problems include:
- "Irritable Bowel Syndrome" (based on cramps and abdominal pain)
- "depression" (based on the fatigue, lethargy, depression, inability to concentrate and headaches)
- fybromyalgia or rheumatoid arthritis (based on joint pain/swelling),
Dr. Berger recommends stool-sample analysis plus the following three-test series as a way of conclusively diagnosing a yeast infection:
- Enzyme immunoassay (ELISA) test for Candida antigen (CAg)
- Enzyme immunoassay (ELISA) test for Candida antibody (Cab)
- Counter-immuno electrophoresis test for Candida antibody (CIE Cab)
Another excellent source of information on yeast infections is The Yeast Syndrome, by John Parks Trowbridge, M.D., and Morton Walker, D.P.M. The book includes 11 questionnaires to help you determine if you have a yeast-related disorder, more information on laboratory diagnostic tests, plus treatments you can initiate on your own, as well as those which require the participation of a medical doctor.
Hypothroidism
Another commonly misdiagnosed condition is hypothroidism. We again quote the late Stuart M. Berger, M.D., in his (now out-of-print) book What Your Doctor Didn't Learn in Medical School-Your Guide to the Most Frequently Misdiagnosed Illnesses.
"Commonly, the fatigue and lethargy of hypothyroidism (HT) mimics the clinical signs of depression, and it is not uncommon for people to find themselves saddled with a diagnosis of mental illness. They may get put on strong drugs, including mood elevators and antidepressants, when, in fact, it is not their brain chemistry but their thyroid that is at fault. This is a particular problem for women, not only because women are four times more likely than men to suffer from thyroid disorders in the first place, but because many physicians are quick to label women as suffering from "hysterical" symptoms when they can find nothing obviously wrong.
Similarly, according to a study from New Jersey's Biopsychiatry Center, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, thyroid problems in women are often misdiagnosed as premenstrual syndrome. The study suggested that as many as two-thirds of PMS diagnoses may in fact reflect subclinical thyroid disorders." (Pg. 92.)
[Href: Symptoms of and testing for Hypothyroidism]
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