Dysautonomia International Conference 2018 (Nashville, TN)

JaimeS said:
I guess I'm saying that it's not just that ME can be psychologized. It's that every time a doctor with a certain frame of mind encounters something he does not understand -- especially if it's neurological -- it's labeled psychosomatic. It's a pattern where the doctor can't admit they don't know what's happening and fields the patient to psych to avoid the cognitive dissonance and/or pass the buck to the patient to fix a problem over which it's implied they should have control.
Click to expand...

I think this is the root error in the medical system. If this one error - defaulting to psychological cause - was corrected there would be much less iatrogenic harm and death; fewer needless appointments / testing and more accurate referrals / testing; better patient-physician relationships; and more time for mental health workers to support people with actual mental health challenges.

The second biggest problem, while I'm ranting, is the crazy long hours they make doctors work. No wonder medical error is the third leading cause of death. They are not making widgets in a factory, there are playing with people's lives.

Maybe the real root error is the god complex.
 
Interesting:

The big news in POTS has been the discovery of autoantibodies that are whacking a receptor (adrenergic-1 receptor) in the legs that causes the veins in our legs to narrow or vasconstrict as we stand. The knock on the past autoantibody POTS studies has been their size, but Grubb reported that a much larger antibody study (75 patients) found that no less that 92% of POTS patients had autoantibodies which were attacking that receptor, and other autoantibodies were elevated as well. There will be more on this study and its implications in the second blog.

POTS is looking more and more like an autoimmune disorder.

Grubb said he’d suspected autoimmunity in POTS all along but the testing used to be too expensive. It’s still expensive, but a lot less than it used to be.

The autoimmune finding looks like it’s going to redefine at least a very large subset of POTS patients and possibly the disease itself. Not only that, but it’s affecting other fields as well. Taking a clue from the POTS findings, Dr. Scheibenbogen found evidence of autoimmunity in about 40% of ME/CFS patients. Reports from the ME/CFS Montreal Conference suggest that a follow-up study from another lab is getting similar results.​
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom