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Old 03-14-2012, 03:14 PM
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alice md alice md is offline
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alice md alice md is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2009
Posts: 884
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A tourist walks in the zoo and reaches the cage of the giraffe.
He looks and looks, rubs his head and finally says-There is no animal like that.

It's hard enough to deal with this illness without having to deal with this *******. There are giraffes and there are (unfortunately) atypical forms of MG.

My personal opinion about "conversion"/hysteria etc. is very similar to that of the psychiatrist Eliot Slater-

-"In the main the diagnosis of ‘hysteria’ applies to a disorder of the doctor–patient relationship. It is evidence of non-communication, of a mutual misunderstanding ... We are, often, unwilling to tell the full truth or to admit to ignorance ... Evasions, even untruths, on the doctor’s side are among the most powerful and frequently used methods he has for bringing about an efflorescence of ‘hysteria’… Looking back over the long history of ‘hysteria’ we see that the null hypothesis has never been disproved. No evidence has yet been offered that the patients suffering from ‘hysteria’ are in medically significant terms anything more than a random selection. … The only thing that hysterical patients can be shown to have in common is that they are all patients... The diagnosis of ‘hysteria’ is all too often a way of avoiding a confrontation with our own ignorance. This is especially dangerous when there is an underlying organic pathology, not yet recognized. In this penumbra we find patients who know themselves to be ill but, coming up against the blank faces of doctors who refuse to believe in the reality of their illness, proceed by way of emotional lability, overstatement and demands for attention ... Here is an area where catastrophic errors can be made. In fact it is often possible to recognise the presence though not the nature of the unrecognisable, to know that a man must be ill or in pain when all the tests are negative. But it is only possible to those who come to their task in a spirit of humility."

Eliot Slater, ‘Diagnosis of “Hysteria”’, British Medical Journal, 29 May 1965, p. 1399.
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"Thanks for this!" says:
AnnieB3 (03-15-2012)