I’m getting my game face on this morning. The clinic is maxed out at 100%. Every clinician-hour is scheduled for the entire week, and I have four new ones to evaluate today, I hear.
So maybe it’s just natural my coffee-browsing minutes this morning drifted more that direction than toward the other projects and interests than would win my attention if my day didn’t belong to the health care system.
[So to the tune of “Let’s Get Physical” (Olivia Newton-John. Remember?) Ann and I this work-morning are singing “Let’s get clinical, clinical…”]
And I ran across some web sources I’ve bookmarked to share at work. I’m willing to bet that at least one of the four new patients I meet today will be diagnosed with FMS, fibromyalgia syndrome. They won’t even be able to pronounce it correctly, and if they go to the web for information, there’s a lot of junk out there.
Their suffering is real, the reasons are still illusive. But it is no longer dismissed as merely female hysteria.
National Fibromyalgia Association
Johns Hopkins And National Fibromyalgia Association Launch Fibromyalgia Educational Initiative
The latest Fibromyalgia News articles
Fibromyalgia Can No Longer Be Called The “Invisible” Syndrome
I will read these when I have a few minutes. One of my friends says she has this and I need to understand it better.
My wife suffered from several months of unexplained severe pain a couple of years ago. After our Internist, an infectious disease specialist, a neurologist, and an endocrinologist all essentially gave up on finding a cause, she ended up at a Rheumatologist who refused to accept a diagnosis of FMS. The doctor said NFS is what doctors diagnose when they don’t know what else to do. It turned out to be a Vitamin D deficiency and we learned much later that the lab had some problems with it’s Vit D testing so the normal Vit D result that out Internist had received initially was probably faulty. Apparently the sun screen nazis of the last 20 years have created a new problem – people who aren’t getting enough Vit D from the usual natural source. Sometimes you can’t win…
That NFS above should be FMS. I got one out three letters in the right place!