Comment by kstrauser 2 hours ago
I went to a psychiatrist to be evaluated for ADHD. He diagnosed me with anxiety, saying that being anxious made it hard for me to focus.
Uh.
I went to another doc who diagnosed me with and started treating me for ADHD. Boom. Anxiety gone. Turns out I was just super anxious about having a hard time working on the un-shiny things I needed to be working on.
It’s different for everyone, of course. In my case, it was almost entirely about me being stressed out that it was impossible to get starting on big, looming projects before they became emergencies. “If I don’t do this, I’ll probably get fired. I know I have to do this. Why can’t I just do this?” is quite anxiety producing.
It makes me uneasy how people with ADHD shopped around until they got a diagnosis like this. Surely you let the doctor tell YOU whats wrong with you, rather than you tell the doctor?
Have some confidence in your ability to learn.
If you trust a general doctor’s read of you in 11 minutes a year more than your own, it’s time to look within way more often.
Double-check yourself with your practitioner, but don’t sleep at the wheel.
Because it is YOU at the wheel - regardless what anyone wants!
No way, no how. It’s called advocating for yourself, in the parlance of our times, and it’s not remotely limited to just this one aspect. Doctors are extremely busy and don’t have the time to go Dr. House on your specific case. If you go in with symptoms A, B, and C, and they stop listening at A and diagnose you with something that causes A, insist that they consider B and C, too.
Also, a good doctor won’t take issue with this, so long as you don’t insist that your 5 minutes on WebMD is right and they’re wrong.
Analogy: If someone at work says they can’t log in, and also that their already logged in password queries don’t work, it could mean that the login service is down and the database is down. It could also mean that AWS is down, and rebooting those other services isn’t going to fix the common root cause.
There are a lot of bad doctors out there. Like, dangerously bad.
If you think a doctor is wrong, they very well might be, particularly if you have already done your homework. This is not the old days, where medical knowledge is exclusively available to doctors. In fact, it is a huge risk to go in unprepared and ignorant of the possibilities, because misdiagnoses are not uncommon if critical symptoms get overlooked due to the patient not presenting them.
Ask yourself not how many doctors graduated with honors. Ask yourself how many barely graduated after cheating their way through the program and are now faking their way through life.
If the medical system was infallible, you'd have a solid point. In practice, medical professionals operate within their own biases, rather than being purely objective observers of your symptoms
It’s so nice when you finally feel okay.
I received both of these diagnoses,
and then ended up finding mold toxicity, Lyme, high levels of EBV, mycoplasma pneumoniae, and staph in some dental work.
Resolving all of those (a long process!) has left me cool as a cucumber, in comparison. Higher bandwidth, effective.
No easy feat - but it was better to work on that list than a permanent list of conditions like I was left with!