Another 19 year old woman came in yesterday with her parents with a headache. According to her parents she had recently been diagnosed with "susac disease". Had never heard of it so I looked it up on the internet. From what I can gather it is an autoimmune disease that somehow blocks some blood vessels in the brain having to do with hearing, cognition. It causes bilateral hearing loss, headache, confusion. This women couldn't hear. Her parents said she was disoriented. She had a bad headache. This disease lasts 2-4 years and then goes away on its own.
Got me to thinking about auto-immune diseases. We see some people with lupus, MS, arthritis, to name a few. It is fascinating to me that the majority who suffer from these disorders are women, especially women in their child bearing years. Some people may have a genetic predisposition to these problems. Fibromyalgia has similar symptoms to auto-immune diseases but is not considered auto-immune.
I know that people in the medical profession don't always take something like fibromyaligia seriously. The symptoms are vague, often seem to occur in middle aged women. The symptoms are muscle pains that seem like everyone would get as they get older. A lot of people think that it is depression that is not being treated. Who knows?
What I wonder about is the fact that these are diseases in which the body attacks itself. What would trigger such a thing? I wonder how much stress plays a part in this. Long term stress can have terrible physical effects on the body. It causes hormones to go out of whack. It throws the whole system off and I wonder if it isn't behind a lot of disease. There is so little study of the role of stress, emotional state in disease. I have a feeling some day that the connection will be made and will be a shock to the medical world. It will explain so much.
In the ER we see so many people who are depressed, lonely. Many people manifest their unhappiness physically with vague abdominal pain, headaches,etc. I think some people actually make themselves physically sick, they are so unhappy. Our society has become so stressful and isolating that the only way a lot of people get attention is by getting sick.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
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2 comments:
I have fibromyalgia, and also depression that has been treated (both medically and via counseling) for many, many, many years. I continue taking antidepressants, and expect to be on it for the rest of my life.
I would not be surprised if it can finally be proven that fibromyalgia is an auto-immune disorder. I don't believe that it's a result of depression, but that instead, depression seems to go hand in hand with it, due to the daily pain.
For me, it's a daily struggle with chronic pain, and also with new onset pain from time to time. I have had s/s of fibromyalgia since I was a pre-teen. No one believed me back then, and it wasn't until I was in my early 20's that I was finally diagnosed. Since then, I still come across health care professionals that do not believe the disorder exists, and that's very frustrating. It's like they are telling me "your pain isn't real".
Let me just say this: the pain is VERY real. And I wish I didn't have to cope with it every day of my life.
I'm not a medical professional, thus my reading is rather limited, but it seems that there may be a relationship to carrying male babies, with the xy chromosone that the female body recognizes as foreign. Maybe it's carrying any babies with chromosones that don't match the mother's that triggers some of this stuff?
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