Pay My Doctor

Your Health: What Your Doctor Isn’t Telling You

We are conditioned to rely on our doctors and other health care practitioners for our health. Then we put our health in their hands hoping they can fix us when something goes wrong.

But your doctor is not there to make you healthy.
They are there to treat your symptoms. You go to the doctor so they can treat your sickness. But there’s something they may not be telling you.

70% of disease is preventable. And much of it is also reversible. Chronic diseases like heart disease, stroke, some cancers, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, obesity, metabolic syndrome, and respiratory diseases are greatly influenced by your lifestyle. What that means for you is that you are not a prisoner to your diagnosis or your prognosis. Unless you choose to be.

Tags: fruits and vegetables health care practitioners long term health

Concern and Going to Doctors: Do They Help

The immediate thought that most of us have is that going to a doctor will reduce concern. However, this is of course often not true. Let us take a simple headache as an example.
In the town in which I lived, probably 100 people wake up each morning with a headache, and only1or 2 go to the doctor. They usually, but not always, turn out to be the most concerned out of the 100.

The first is a woman of 25 who is afraid of her recurrent headaches, thinking she probably has a brain tumour. She is hoping to be taken seriously and properly investigated and treated. She has come today because it is particularly bad, and she had a row with her boy friend last night over a TV program about doctors misdiagnosing cancers. The doctor is a bit rushed and does not discover all her fears but he does discover her fear of a brain tumour and see her immense relief at being allowed to talk about it. He examines her thoroughly, including her fundi (the retina using an ophthalmoscope). This is on the doctor’s part, of course, intended to be both diagnostic and therapeutic. After discussion, explanation, advice and the offer of a possible follow up appointment, she leaves with less concern than when she arrived. Her health understanding has changed a little, but the change is brittle and it will not take much to bring her back.

Our second patient is a 56 year old Banker who says he is not too concerned about his recent onset of migraines because his mother got them at about this age, but he would like some of those new injections or something like that which he read about in the evening paper. The doctor goes through a similar routine. This time he notices something medically worrying, a nystagmus or twitch to the left and swelling of the left optic disc with a fuzzy right disc, these are signs of increased pressure in the brain, the doctor is anxious. Our patient picks up on the doctor’s concern, and the urgent need for neurological opinion raises his anxiety level considerably despite soothing but unconvincing blandishments from his doctor.

Tags: brain tumour immense relief recurrent headaches

Why Doctors Dismiss Your Symptoms

It’s funny how there are some things that doctors jump to treat, but others that they ignore. For example, if I came in with high blood pressure, high BMI, and high cholesterol, you can bet I’d get some sort of drug for it (if I were a few decades older).

As another example, if I came in and said I had depression, you can bet I’d get an antidepressant. In my experience, depression is one of the easiest things to get a prescription for. In fact, sometimes a prescription will be pushed upon you even when you don’t describe any diagnosis-worthy symptoms of depression (e.g. doctors recommended antidepressants for me when I described the symptoms of refractory Lyme and coinfections).

In contrast, there are other conditions that most doctors simply brush away.
For example, every time I go to the doctor, my temperature is between 96 F and 96.5 F. This is out of the normal range of 97.5 to 98.8 F. Moreover, I don’t feel good at this temperature. I don’t have enough energy, I get chills, I have night sweats, and I have Raynaud’s phenomenon.

Tags: experience depression low body temperature night sweats

Talk to Your Doctor About Osteoporosis

What other disease do you know of that will affect one out of every two women in their lifetime? Osteoporosis can sneak up on women unless they are informed and actively working on prevention of this life threatening disease. Talking to your health professional about the risks and ways to fight off osteoporosis is the best place to start.

Women of every age should be discussing osteoporosis with their doctors. Because a woman’s bones are at their peak of strength at age 25, bone loss can begin as early as the twenties or thirties. Women can prevent bone loss and debilitating fractures by following the recommendations made by their doctors.

Ask your doctor about risk factors for osteoporosis. There are a number of factors that increase your risk of developing osteoporosis, and many women will have multiple risk factors. For example, a white woman with a slim frame who smokes and does not do any type of weight bearing exercise might appear healthy, but her risk of developing osteoporosis is greatly increased. If she doesn’t get enough calcium and vitamin D in her diet, she is at even greater risk. She should talk to her doctor about some simple lifestyle changes that will reduce those risk factors.

Tags: bone mineral density diet supplements risk factors for osteoporosis

Important Questions Your Doctor Should Ask

The other day, as I went out for my evening stroll, one of my neighbors stopped me to ask me if I might recommend a good doctor to him. Seems that my neighbor was getting fed up with his current doc, every time he would visit the office, he would be rushed in/out and handed a script for some pills. In fact, he couldn’t even recall the last time his doctor took the time to ask him what was actually wrong! This got me to thinking, you see I am fortunate to have a doctor who is a family friend and a good doctor as well. So I asked him, as a doctor, what would you look for in a fellow doc?

All to often, he said most doctors don’t take the time to do a few simple things to make sure they are really taking the best care of there patents. He went on to share with me a few of the key things he felt a doctor should be doing when you make an office visit.

A routine examination will be made, of course, of your heart. Your blood pressure will be taken. Other vital signs such as temperature and weight should be checked and compared with your last visit.

Tags: evening stroll glucose tolerance test routine examination

Men, Get Over It – Go To The Doctor

Many men don’t like going to doctors unless they’ve had their arm blown off in combat, or have been run over by a truck. They’ll go these rare times voluntarily, because they really want that arm sewn back on or those broken bones set.

What about those times when something’s just not right, and worse yet, it’s of a more personal and intimate nature? What about when you’re standing there peeing blood, or suddenly your bowels have gone all wonky? Do you run to the doctor? Nope. You ignore it and hope it goes away. The cramps will go away, the weird sensations will go away, and the problem will disappear. You may think you can work through this on your own.

Women are more accustomed to having their personal health issues widely publicized. Watch TV for five minutes and you’ll see more than your share of ads for feminine hygiene products of every nature. There are numerous reminders for women about breast cancer, cervical cancer and yeast infections. With the help of strong media campaigns, women seem to have gotten over their reluctance to address signs and symptoms that could indicate conditions that are far more serious.

Tags: feminine hygiene products penile cancer personal health issues

Ask Your Doctor and Listen

If you are a typical patient, you actually do about half of what your doctor tells you. Think about your last visit. After you started to feel better did you discontinue the medication they prescribed you early? Do you have some pills left over? Did you really adhere to the diet recommendations? Did you increase or limit your activity as the doctor instructed? Did you take the medication prescribed erratically or exactly as you were instructed to? When a new illness occurred in your family did you use any of the leftover medication? Most patients don’t fully understand their doctor’s advice in the first place, so not following that advice precisely is not really all that surprising. There are consequences to not following your doctor’s advice.

The first consequence is the complete waste of your time and money. Doctors don’t come cheap. If you are proactively seeking advice why would you not try to understand it and ultimately follow it? That is kind of silly. After you have traveled to the doctor’s office, waited to see the doctor, spent time with the doctor, gone to the pharmacy to buy the medication and then return home, you have invested a good amount of time and effort. Don’t waste all of that by not asking questions to fully understand the advice and failing to follow through.

There can be serious medical consequence if you do not follow instructions properly. The disease may persist, come back, complications occur or you may suffer negative side effects. The most common problem is that your health issue does not go away. Many times patients stop following the instructions to early. The symptoms of a health issue may go away long before you are actually healthy again. By ending the prescribed path by your doctor early you can very realistically cause the issue to grow larger.

» Read more: Ask Your Doctor and Listen

Tags: diet recommendations health issue typical patient

Going to the Doctor – is it Satisfying

Satisfaction is a commonly measured factor in many articles about doctor patient communication. The simple equation being high satisfaction = good, low satisfaction = bad. However, as usual, life is not quite that straightforward. Many health messages are not particularly satisfying, even if a jury of health professionals would concur with them: the continuing craze for lifestyle advice, enhanced in the UK by a payment system reinforcing such doctor behaviour, being an obvious example.

Think of a friend who goes to her family doctor with a cough and is told to stop smoking, loose weight, have her cervix smeared, her breasts examined and cholesterol measured and is then told that she cannot have any cough mixture prescribed and to go to the chemist (drugstore) and buy some if she really wants it. To a large section of the community this may be profoundly unsatisfying, but to the majority of the medical profession this would now be seen as good practice and certainly lucrative.

There is an easy way for the medics to satisfy most of us patients, and that is to give us what we want. Most alternative therapies work on this principal. The traditional baked bean healing strategy works on the principal of the healer always having an answer and always satisfying the patient.

Tags: cough mixture doctor patient communication unnecessary antibiotics

Never Accept Just One Doctor’s Opinion

There are five critical realities about medicine and doctors today, and some realities have changed radically over the past decade.

First, doctors have little, if any, training in nutrition, or how to prevent or cure diseases. That’s not an opinion – it’s well documented. Look at the curriculum of any medical school. Doctors are not schooled in nutrition, or in preventing or curing diseases. They admit that themselves if you ask them.

Second, doctors treat symptoms. For the past 100 years and longer the practice of medicine has focused on observing and treating the symptoms presented by the patient, usually by prescribing drugs that affect the symptoms.

Tags: cause of heart disease heart disease cancer school doctors

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