Take Two Happy Pills and Call Me In the Morning
NB: This post was originally written on October 24, 2008 in response to a couple news items I had read and revised in August, 2010, for submission to the latest Chronic Babe Blog Carnival (#10) which asks the question: “How do you Deal with the Medical Establishment.” Well, sometimes, I rant:
Half of Doctors Routinely Prescribe Placebos:
Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, one of the study’s authors, said doctors should not prescribe antibiotics or sedatives as placebos, given those drugs’ risks. Use of less active placebos is understandable, he said, since risks are low.
“Everyone comes out happy: the doctor is happy, the patient is happy,” said Dr. Emanuel, chairman of the bioethics department at the health institutes. “But ethical challenges remain.”
Happy? How would this make me happy? Why would I be happy about being given a fake or off-label drug that may work. But these aren’t always the “sugar pill” placebos which are harmless, these are actual prescription medications that could harm a patient.
While the sugar in the placebo pill might give one some sort of sugar high for a few minutes and generate some sort of pseudo-happy feelings, I doubt this is what this doctor is referring to. Methinks this doctor and others like him may be the only ones who are happy. “Happy” that they have done “something” about the patient’s “problem.” Perhaps happier still that they have gotten the patient out of their office in record time. Maybe this one will work, the patient mutters unhappily as they leave the doctor’s office, prescription clutched in their hand.
Fibromyalgia Patients “Difficult”
Dr. William Schreiber, an internist in Louisville, Ky., at first said in an interview that he did not believe the survey’s results, because, he said, few doctors he knows routinely prescribe placebos.
But when asked how he treated fibromyalgia or other conditions that many doctors suspect are largely psychosomatic, Dr. Schreiber changed his mind. “The problem is that most of those people are very difficult patients, and it’s a whole lot easier to give them something like a big dose of Aleve,” he said. “Is that a placebo treatment? Depending on how you define it, I guess it is.”
Okay wait a minute here. I have fibromyalgia. I didn’t chose this illness, it chose me. I’m sorry if it makes me a “difficult patient.” If doctors only want the “easy” patients then they should leave medicine. Have doctors that have that attitude ever been sick? Or were they just not in line the day that the empathy gene was being passed out?
The reality is some of the treatments work some of the time for some of the people. Some of the treatments don’t work at all. Often, the treatments cause undesirable side effects. For me, after I was first diagnosed in 1996, it became easy for me to fall into chasing the next treatment, the newest medication, the latest supplement, diet, vitamin, herb, etc. touted as being the “fix” for fibromyalgia. After thousands of dollars spent, and feeling not really that much better, I’m trying to get off that merry-go-round.
Dr. Mark J. Pellegrino, an MD who has fibromyalgia himself, and who has treated over 20,000 patients at his clinic in Ohio, states in his book “Fibromyalgia – Up Close and Personal”
Understand there is no magical pill that will get rid of all fibromyalgia symptoms.
Gee, not even a placebo?
No wonder chronic pain patients frequently experience depression. I’d like to see a time where people like Dr. Schreiber walk a day in our shoes. Maybe then things will change, but the cynic in me whispers I doubt it.
