Quote:
Originally Posted by TXBatman
If you go to a doctor with a list of 30 different symptoms, their very first thought is going to be that you are a hypochondriac that is disease shopping. I don't say that to knock anybody who truly suffers from alot of symptoms...I say it because doctors are trained to look for the most likely scenario and then to work from there. Anybody who comes in and attributes every possible ailment to a single cause is somebody who is going to trigger that kind of response in a doctor.
If you have never been to a hypochondriac forum online, go take a look some time. There is a huge fixation on things like MS and cancer, and many of them are convinced they have one or both, and can rattle off a huge list of their symptoms. Again, not a knock on anybody here...just saying that doctors see those folks too and have to try to decide with each patient, what is real and what is not. With a disease like MS, where there is often little in the way of physical evidence for our disease, and the symptoms are often fleeting and hard to measure or test, it can be very dificult for them to sort the wheat from the chaff and determine where to start with testing. An MRI is a good start, and a sign your doctor is not completely blowing you off.
My opinion has always been that people who think they might have MS are better off describing maybe 3-5 of their "worst" symptoms or the ones that most impair their daily life, and then saying "here is a list of other things I am encountering, but I really don't know if they are related or not." That gives a doctor a much more limited set of things to look at. They can test for evidence of other things that could cause the "main symptoms" and then use the other list as possible corroboration of what they think it might be. In the end, doing it that way might help lead the doctor through the process of elimination that is an MS dx, without first starting with the question of whether they are dealing with a hypochondriac.
Hope that helps understand where the doctor might be coming from. I hope that you and your Dr. are able to find some answers from your MRI.
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Thanks for the input and I can understand what you are saying. However, most of the time when doctors see that I have bipolar they quickly dismiss me and that is very frustrating. Yes, I gave him a list of symptoms but I also told him that I knew they weren't all things that were neurological but I wanted him to have the big picture. We discussed only a few symptoms which were the major ones and the ones that are neurological in nature. I truly hope I don't have MS but I can't ignore it when it should have been ruled out and wasn't. Also my new rheumy did tell me to see a neuro to be examined and have tests done.