There was a time that demons caused mental illness and
when blood-letting was a cure-all. In America and around the world, tragically, "mental illness" itself is the medical wastebasket used as an easy excuse for lazy, unempathic physicians to conjure as the demon that produces the terrible symptoms of ME, CFS:DIRE.
A Disproportionately High Number are RNs and MDs
Nothing could be further from the truth. Because, ironically, a disproportionately high number of ME, CFS:DIRE sufferers are doctors and nurses. This fact alone should focus certain research efforts on the specifics that would tend to produce such healthcare population morbidity! The answer to this question may help pinpoint a cause or isolate and identify some unique public health or hospital-based reservoir of vulnerability.
Unusually Long and Irregular Working Hours
What comes immediately to mind in this regard, from personal experience, is that the working hours of health professionals are erratic, with varied shifts often with no days off, with rushed meals. Work is really chronic overwork.
Registered Nurses Appear the Most Vulnerable
And, of the most chronically overworked, the one most
highly stressed medical professional - as hospital administrators, pushing for the tight bottom line, demand the most work from the fewest professionals for the lowest pay - and in my day, with no health insurance or retirement plans offered whatsoever. No benefits! This most disadvantaged healthcare provider is the Registered Professional Nurse. All work at all hours. Poor pay. And no help or hope when sick oneself.
Maybe these days RNs are better paid. And maybe these days they have health insurance benefits. However, it's unlikely that excessive patient-care loads and erratic, rotating shifts have disappeared from the hospital arena.
?Karma Payback to MDs Dismissive of ME
Poetic justic occurs when some of the arrogant, dismissive doctors, or their close relatives or friends, themselves develop ME, CFS:DIRE. They'll be the first to note that their febrile, gastrointestinal, cerebral, and muskuloskeletal relapses are anything but intrapsychic. Not to mention, the unremittingly frequent bouts of bronchial and/or sinus infections, sometimes by opportunistic bacteria (certainly not a sign of mental illness), which they will be hard put to explain, especially if they don't smoke and take reasonable care of themselves.
Finally, once struck down by this immune-dysfunction- based illness, they will cease telling their ME, CFS:DIRE patients (if these MDs feel well enough and have long enough remissions to still be able to practice medicine) to get out and exercise. Because they, too, will soon learn
the wisdom this autoimmune, CNS-incapacitating illness
teaches its victims:
EXERTION, EVEN MILD, USUALLY
TRIGGERS RELAPSES OF CYTOKINE-
INDUCED VIRAL ENCEPHALOMYELITIS
aka Chronic Fatigue Syndrome aka
Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome
aka Low Natural Killer Cell Disease aka
Myalgic Encephalomyelitis aka
Debilitating Immunopathic Relapsing Encephalomyelitis
Physicians Sick with ME, CFS:DIRE will learn to
titrate their activities according to the logic of their profound exhaustion illness - immune dysfunction + viral relapse + encephalitis. Not according to some arbitrary fantasy by psychiatrists looking for a whole new category and cache of patients. Not according to some medical establishment delusion that the estimated 24,000,000
ME, CFS:DIRE worldwide victims are "depressives" or "hypochondriacs". Not according to some conventional nonsense that the suffering of relapsing viral encephalitis, myelitis, and a crippled immune system triggering excess neuroendorphins to flood the body and brain, are an incidental footnote to their health record.
As these now afflicted MDs will see, ME, CFS:DIRE requires serious medical attention, when they are forced to stay abed with non-migrainous nausea, photophobia, tachypnea, tachycardia, mucosal burning in bronchi, esophagus and sinuses due to flare-ups; the same viral-
immune process also inflicting encephalic misery.
When their lives are sharply curtailed, or they're stopped dead in their tracks, despite goals, desires, appointments, loved activities - totally uncharacteristic of depression - they too may finally research and develop sensible health regimens to assist their fellow patients toward recovery.
In the meantime, we wait. Unhelped by medical doctors.
(c) Copyright 1992 to 2018 by Dr. Helen Borel.
All rights reserved.
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