What Chronic Pain Teaches You About Doctors: ‘That's Why They Call It a Practice’
/By Crystal Lindell
There’s an old story often shared in my family about my great uncle Jim. It’s a story I’ve heard since I was a kid, as a warning.
You see, when Jim was 39 years old, he was told to take “heart medication.”
But Jim felt fine, so he ignored the doctor’s orders and never took the pills. And then, one night, while his wife – my aunt Sylvia – was watching TV, Jim went upstairs, fell asleep and died. He never even made it to his 40th birthday.
I never met Jim, but his early and unexpected death sent shock waves through generations of my family. And his story eventually morphed into family folklore, where the moral was that if a doctor gives you medication, you need to take it.
It is with this mindset that I first approached my doctor appointments back in 2013 when I developed chronic pain in my right ribs.
I didn’t know the cause – and to be honest, I still don’t really know for sure how it started – but I did know that I was in a lot of pain, and I was very scared.
So when the doctors started loading me up with prescriptions, I filled every single one of them. Within a couple months, I had a line of pill bottles and patches on my nightstand spanning everything from gabapentin and amitriptyline to lidocaine and other medications I can’t even remember now.
And I took all of them exactly as prescribed.
The only problem was, the lessons of the past did not apply to my situation. The medications were prescribed by a team of doctors who were just throwing stuff at the wall to see if anything would stick.
Taking them in combination caused horrible side effects. I was always on the verge of falling asleep, and I started gaining weight so fast that my clothes would stop fitting in the span of a week.
Not to mention the fact that they also weren’t even doing the one thing I needed: None of them were helping my chronic pain.
It wasn’t until I eventually went to the Mayo Clinic about a year later that I realized the flaws in my logic.
It was there that a doctor told me to just stop taking half the medications I was on. When I questioned her, she was shocked that I had not thought to stop any of them sooner.
It sounds naive in retrospect, but that was the first time I started to realize that doctors were not gods. And that doctors are sometimes guessing when it comes to treatments.
It was a lot to process, because it also meant that I had to reckon with the fact that I could no longer just blindly follow whatever treatment they were giving me. Rather, I was going to have to figure out a lot of this for myself.
There’s a common myth that if you ever get sick, a doctor will save you. But when you develop any sort of chronic health condition, you realize that doctors are just humans too. They come into appointments with prejudices, egos, bias, and flawed information. They also often disagree with other doctors.
This can be extremely difficult to navigate because when it comes to your health, a lot of treatments really are about life or death. And filtering out which ones are life and which ones might be death is dangerous business. Doctors are definitely needed to guide us, but they can’t be relied upon to do it alone.
There’s an old saying about doctors: “There’s a reason they call it a practice.” Even doctors are still learning about the complexity of our bodies. Because as I said, they are not gods, and as such, they can’t be relied upon to be our saviors.
In the end, we have to save ourselves.
It’s not quite as comforting to see the world that way, with the knowledge that nobody is coming to save us. But it’s more realistic. And a lot more likely to actually save you.
