Western Medicine

Few things in this journey have upset me more than the realization that medical knowledge is incredible limited. I certainly don't blame my doctors. The human body is an incredible complex organic machine. My ire is more directed at the human hubris of believing that we "understand" so much about health. We don't! As advanced as medicine has become, we honestly understand only a fraction of how our bodies and genes and hormones and systems and environments all interact to produce our daily condition.

For me this dearth of insight is compounded by regularly being told I have "conditions" that are diagnoses of elimination. My bowels were, and still are, problematic. After extensive testing by a number of specialists, I firmly know that I have Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Of course that means nothing since no one actually knows what the "disease" is. IBS is a fancy way of saying, "your bowels are problematic, but we don't know why." Equally annoying are my sinuses. I definitely had, and still have, chronic sinusitis. My initial CT definitely showed that surgery would be the best course of action. Since that surgery in August of 2003, I have continued to be plagued by regular sinus infections and constant sinus swelling and inflammation. My ENT "vacuums" out my sinuses every six weeks, and I rinse my sinuses two different way twice each day. The crazy part is that the surgery worked! There is no reason why my sinuses should still be doing this, but two different ENTs, two different allergists and plenty of other doctors have been unable to find a reason. I am in that tiny fraction of sinus suffers that belie conventional knowledge.

And then there is narcolepsy. The first time that I fully realized narcolepsy is similar to my other conditions, I wanted to vomit - literally. Narcolepsy IS diagnosed by diagnostic testing. Pulmonary doctors have clearly defined methods to identify the disease. But, no one knows how the disease works. The best guess is that something is "wrong" in the sufferer's brain chemistry, likely a problem in the hypothalamus. Still, like IBS and my sinuses, all I can do is treat my symptoms. There is nothing I can do to improve my condition; I can only try to manage it. I feel like I am reach a level of acceptance with all of it, but it is so hard.

The final piece of my angst stems from the system itself. Managed care is great, until you get seriously ill. Specialists are amazing, until you don't fit neatly into a box. I have seen 18 specialists, 2 family practice doctors and an internal medicine doctor in the six and a half year journey since things became awful. All of the doctors have done their best, but they barely have time to see me in their offices, let alone talk to each other about my case. The one place that could happen is at the Mayo Clinic, but they aren't taking "new" patients and haven't been for two years. I can't believe that Western Medicine can be so advanced, and yet so backwards. Clearly, more than one system is involved - even if it is just my narcolepsy, yet a specialist won't even consider exploring those ideas. Part of it is the fear of malpractice, but it is also that a specialists knowledge base is so narrowly focused.

Thankfully, I have an acupuncturist, a chiropractor, a massage therapist, a therapist, a psychiatrist, and a men's group. All of them aid me in coping with the bigger picture of my life. That holistic approach will be what allows me to push through even the darkest days. But, what about the hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who also suffer the way I do, yet do not have all of these other resources. We need to find a better system. We need to incorporate more Eastern ideas into our medical approaches. More than anything, we need to begin treating the entire person and not just the fraction that seems to be "broken."