“It’s not your fault…” These were some of the first words I heard when I was seated in the surgeons office with the nurses who had just given me confirmation of my diagnosis. I suppose these words were mean’t to be comforting, but to me they were not.
Blaming doesn’t get you anywhere, but the fact that there were years of symptoms left unexplained really makes me question the role of our health system.
If you were like me, I had symptoms for 20 years prior to my diagnosis. All my symptoms were related to two things: hormones and detoxification pathways. After learning about my DNA only 1 week back we discovered that my body is unable to process and remove one very crucial hormone: Estrogen and that my body in general had a broken link in removing toxin, both a disastrous combination.
I had visited doctors numerous times for symptoms of headaches, migraines, extreme intolerance to caffeine and alcohol, swollen painful joints, chronic diahrrea, and insomnia, all at the top of the list. Every single doctor just put their hands up and said “I don’t know”.
This is the expected response when their training is confined to symptom management, screening and treatment and very limited in terms of disease prevention and understanding an individual’s unique requirements to express their greatest health.
As a public health professional I question the validity of the current state of our system in being able to keep Canadian’s healthy.
Considering the abundance of technology at our finger tips compared with the 15 minute maximum a doctor will spend with you, patients are now better informed than ever. This is an advantageous aspect that needs to be incorporated into the system.
Among policy makers and administers there is much talk on patient-centered care and individualized medicine, and I sadly need to concur that this is still just talk.
As wait time management ended years back, the current state of the health system in Ontario took many steps back making wait times worse than before the program had been implemented, was there no exit strategy in place? So I ask, how is care patient centred when family doctors now limit appointments to just one issue per visit and maximum 15 minutes per patient?
Much more needs to be done to implement theory to practice.
It’s not your fault… only seems to add fire to my flame, as I relied on the system to help me understand what was going on with my body and only with the diagnosis of cancer was I pushed into understanding that if you want health you need to get it yourself.