It wasn’t always this way. I used to trust that doctors could, and would, cure me. They knew all the right answers, whether I needed medication, and which medications would fix me. Going to a medical establishment carried the promise of making me feel better within hours or days.

That was before I became ill with a chronic disease, Ankylosing Spondylitis. That was before I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder, Anxiety, and PTSD.

Many believe, like I used to, that visiting a doctor means getting better. But doctors who treat permanent diseases have a tough job: they stare down diagnoses every day that they can’t eradicate. There’s a huge difference between curing a temporary malady and managing a lifelong disease. And to choose to be a doctor who treats patients with incurable diseases takes special courage – or a desire to make a considerable amount of money.

Doctors leave medical school with heads full of practical clinical terms: elevated T-cell count, HLA-B27 positive, elevated bilirubin, polyenthesopathy, erosion of the spine with bone calcification. But, unless they share our diseases, they do not know what it is like to be in our bodies; to feel our forever pain, our fatigue, our fears. They rely on us to paint a picture of what it actually feels like to have a high T-cell count and polyenthesopathy, but many of them forget to ask, and when they do, sometimes they don’t know why they need to know what the patient is actually feeling. If they’re smart, they try to help us manage our pain, fatigue, and fears by prescribing treatments based on what they see in lab, X-ray, and MRI results, with final decisions based on the symptoms we present. Continue reading The Doctor Who Renewed My Hope In Doctors →