Ask Your Doctor If Believing You Is Right For You

This isn't a slander against doctors post. There are plenty of doctors out there that still care and take time to learn about their patients. I've built my entire care team around providers like this but not without having to advocate for myself. There's a growing number of doctors without humanity and it just doesn't sit right with me at all.

Western medicine is great, especially in an emergency, but in my honest opinion, most doctors are subpar at best when it comes to preventative care. Yep, I said it, now who's gonna fight me?

No but for real though, my trust in hospitals gets a lot closer to 100 percent when it comes to surgeries. Diagnosis though? Not really and that's because so many people, myself included, have had our symptoms dismissed by doctors who are limited by what they were taught. I’m not attacking anyone, that's just the truth.

What grinds my gears are doctors acting like medicine is the final word on everything when it's not. Medicine is a science. Just like nutrition is a science, which means things are actively being studied and changed every single day. The things we don’t know today, could be the exact thing we’re doing wrong tomorrow. 

So what's extra wild to me is a lot of people will turn around and say "doctors can't be trusted" and then use a diagnosis from that same system as an excuse not to take care of their body.

Unless the diagnosis is terminal, and even then it's case by case, as there are people told they have weeks to live who outlive that timeline by years. The point is, science only knows so much.

Medical gaslighting happens when a healthcare provider dismisses, minimizes, or flat out ignores a patient's symptoms or concerns. Not because there's nothing wrong, but because of assumptions based on your age, weight, gender, race, mental health history, or simply the fact that you "look fine" on the outside.

It usually sounds like this.

"you're too young to have that."

"it's probably just stress."

"your labs came back normal."

"have you tried losing weight?"

I heard some version of all of those. I got my first high cholesterol reading at 21 and two different doctors dismissed me because I was young and thin and seemed healthy. While nutritionists told me to eat what the fuck ever to gain weight. Heart disease runs in my family. It felt like they weren't listening. Either that, or they simply didn't know what they were talking about.

I kept pushing anyway because I knew my body, my family history, and I knew that "you seem fine" was not a diagnosis. It's an assumption and assumptions are not facts.

Let's be honest about who this happens to most because it matters. Black women, women in general, people in larger bodies, people with mental health histories, and people from lower income backgrounds are disproportionately dismissed by the medical system. Black women in particular are systematically undertreated for pain. That is a published, documented, studied finding that has had real consequences on real people's lives and deaths. Still when you push back, when you say something really doesn't feel right, you get labeled as anxious, difficult, a hypochondriac. So you stop asking. 

Most people don't realize the majority of diseases are rooted in chronic inflammation. I've had multiple doctors tell me I likely have chronic inflammation and then follow it up with "but there's nothing we can do about it." That irks my soul because I know that's not true.

I'm currently reading the 30 day inflammation diet and what's becoming even clearer to me is that food is one of the most powerful tools we have to address inflammation at the root. What you eat every single day is either feeding the inflammation in your body or fighting it. That's the science that a lot of western medicine practitioners aren't talking about.

Literally centuries of Chinese medicine, Native healing practices, and countless traditions outside of western medicine have addressed and reversed chronic inflammation. So if chronic inflammation is the root of most diseases, you can probably connect the dots as to why we're still being told there's nothing we can do about it. I won't get into all of that today.

What I will say is this, you are allowed to get a second opinion, shit, a third one if you need it. That is what self advocacy looks like. Not just for the big scary diagnoses either. For when your labs are normal but you still feel like trash, monitoring that's been going on for three years, for every appointment you left feeling worse than when you walked in.

Ask what your numbers actually mean, what they looked like two years ago, not just today, ask how your family history changes your risk, ask what's actually driving the problem, not just how to cover it up. If your doctor looks annoyed that you're asking, that's data too.

A doctor who shuts down your questions is a doctor who stopped being curious and a doctor who stopped being curious has no business practicing a science.

One of the main reasons I'm excited to go to medical school and study to become a naturopathic doctor is because of what we don't know yet. I'm not going in trying to cure anything, I'm trying to improve the quality of life of people.

I went to see my dermatologist once for a skin issue, nothing serious, but he told me to come back if it got worse because and I quote, "all of us dermatologists are working on a cure for skin cancer." Y'all do know there are other conditions people are suffering and dying from that aren't cancer right? Y'all know this and yet there are less cures than diseases. I wonder why.

Cancer is very serious, not dismissing that, but if that's the only thing they're focused on, what does that mean for everyone with conditions that are non-cancerous but still detrimental? The "we don't know yet" is only useful if someone is actually curious enough to keep asking.

Back to what I was saying at the jump, a lot of us say we don't trust the system and we have real reasons for that. Lived, generational, and documented historical reasons, but then we get a diagnosis and we stop asking questions. We let the diagnosis be the ceiling on what we believe our body is capable of and we hand over authority to the same system we say we don't trust, then wonder why nothing changes.

If you don't fully trust the system, then don't fully outsource your health to it. Do the research, ask questions, and explore the options the system isn't offering you. 

You deserve healthcare that takes you seriously but start by taking yourself seriously first.