Quote:
Originally Posted by AnnieB3
And did he know that the Mestinon and IVIG would most likely make any tests look negative when they are probably positive? Duh. It would be like giving away free money for nothing. Or your insurance company's money.
You have a positive MG antibody and both Mestinon and IVIG work. And this doctor says to stop taking all meds without looking at your records or waiting for any test results?!
So what was the reason for going to Mayo? Sometimes, too much doctoring is a bad thing.
Do not stop taking your meds.
Annie
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In case some more abstract principles are helpful:
My understanding was or is that all physicians are taught that a patient isn't supposed to discontinue a medicine because signs and symptoms are mitigated -- or even absent -- ignoring some kind of remission, the patient will still have the disease and just be untreated.
So I wonder -- when one of the doctors of the ilk you saw actually does prescribe Mestinon and advocate for IVIG, does he specifically expect that ptosis and weakness will remain or only diminish slightly and that his treatment will therefore have been proper?
It's a better idea to use treatment as early as possible in a disease and use it especially when the treatment works by one measure or another. One might otherwise suspect, in seeing a case like this, that the physician is really only giving Mestinon to patients with Bell's Palsy. Before going to bed at night, he may look in the mirror with a self-satisfied smile thinking he's a genius but his patients are probably thinking something else entirely.
It's maddening that the general principle in medicine is seemingly abandoned by some (too many) physicians who are supposed to treat MG and I always rack my brains to try to figure out why. I never come up with an answer. The thought that one or more physicians might defer to another who has abandoned a standard principle of treatment seems to me to be medically dangerous.