George Jelinek, author of Overcoming Multiple Sclerosis, and the first guest in the MS Voices Interview Series

I’m mad as hell. Usually I go easy on doctors, because I truly believe they mean well. But this time, I need to rage. At least for the duration of this post.

A member of my extended family was just diagnosed with MS. His sister reached out to me, asking if I could speak with him. I wrote back and said of course and gave her my number so that he could call me. She replied, saying that he decided he didn’t want to call because he doesn’t think talking to anyone with MS will help.

Why? Because his doctor said he has a rare form. In other words, his case is worse. His case is more hopeless. What might help someone else with MS won’t help him, because for him, it’s different.

I don’t believe in taking hope away from people. Especially not in the name of wanting to protect someone from “getting their hopes up.” Upping your hope is one of the healthiest things you can do for yourself. It powers the engine of your will and it inspires you to operate from a position of possibility. Like this, you’re not looking for what won’t work. You’re looking for what could. Like this, you can begin the search for the information that will help you heal.

Tomorrow I am extremely excited to be contributing to your search for information with the launch of my nine-week interview series called MS Voices – my response to the doctor’s disempowering, hope-snatching doom and gloom. Every week for nine weeks I’ll be interviewing an expert in MS, health, and healing so that I can bring to you first-hand, expert opinions and cutting-edge information on Multiple Sclerosis and health directly to you, for free, so that you don’t have to spend years wasting your time on what doesn’t work and wading through the sea of voices to find the ones worth listening to.

I truly, deeply believe that there is always hope, and that no matter how “rare” or “severe” someone’s case is, there is never a time when one should stop searching for information that could help them get well. Last week I wrote about how my tip about the cheap and natural treatment for UTI’s, D-Mannose, saved my daughter’s friend from having to get a scalpel to her abdomen. Information is power. Information can change everything.

To get the detailed scoop about the MS Voices Interview Series and to sign up for FREE, click here. Tomorrow night we kick the series off at 9 PM EST with Professor George Jelinek, author of Overcoming Multiple Sclerosis (www.overcomingmultiplesclerosis.com). Will you be there? I hope so.

I called the office to speak to the doctor. I said, “Do I have MS?”

She said, “You have lesions in your corpus callosum.”

I said, “Does that mean I have MS?! I don’t know what that means!”

She said, “I can’t tell you that over the phone.”

I said, “I’m in California. I can’t come into the office. But I’m sure you can understand that I really, really, REALLY want to know, so can you please just tell me?”

She said, “I’m sorry but it’s policy that we cannot give results over the phone.” She said it like she worked for the DMV.

I hung up, exasperated. I went back into the training room. My hands were sweaty. I could feel my heartbeat thumping in my chest. I was on the brink of a major anxiety attack. I was also in the midst of experiencing the MS symptom the medical community doesn’t talk about, because the symptom is the frustration with the system itself – a bureaucracy entangled in the mire of malpractice suits, HMO red tape, corruption, and ignorance. Here I was, obviously desperate for an answer, obviously in anguish, obviously wanting to know if my entire life was about to change forever, and my neurologist calmly and coldly quoted policy, clearly more concerned with the liability of giving me such a serious diagnosis over the phone than she was with my emotional experience. This was the first time I truly understood that my doctors’ motivations were not the same as mine. And that this illness would be as much about navigating the deeply flawed system of modern allopathic medicine as it would be about navigating the flawed system of my own ailing body.

Back in the training room, Joseph – in his trademark matter-of-factly humorous way – suggested that since doctors get bossed around so much in medical school, they’re used to it, and respond best to being engaged in that manner, so I might get better results calling her back and forcefully demanding to know my diagnosis. So I went back outside, called her back and did just that, but she continued to evade my questions.

She said, “You have lesions in your corpus callosum.”

So I said, “OK, let me ask you this way, then. If someone has lesions in their corpus callosum, could it be anything but MS?!”

To which she replied, “The chances would be very slim.”

And there I had it. My diagnosis. I had to bully it out of her, but I had my diagnosis. And with that one phrase, I was enlisted into a new and unfamiliar terrain.

I’m recounting this story here because if you’ve been diagnosed with a chronic illness, a huge part of taking control of your life now means navigating the maze of our country’s current medical system. This will be the topic of many, many posts on this blog, but for now I just want to outline some basic flaws in the current system that are working against us as patients within it. I am not a conspiracy theorist. I do believe there are good doctors out there with integrity and soul. My current neurologist appears to be one of them, which is why I continue to see him. But I do think it’s absolutely essential that we educate ourselves about the places where doctors’ motivations may differ from ours, so we can take that into account when making crucial treatment decisions.

1. The allopathic medicine paradigm – which is the standard-of-care in this country – is disease care, not health care. Doctors are trained to treat diseases, not prevent them or to strengthen and balance your body so it can heal. They are trained to treat symptoms with pharmaceutical drugs, and if those drugs give you symptoms, they prescribe more drugs to treat those symptoms. Each part of the body is treated as separate from the whole. Our doctors are not trained to look at our bodies holistically or to believe that healing is possible by restoring the natural balance of the system.

2. Doctors receive no to almost-no training on proper nutrition and the effects of diet on health. Only in the last few years are the more enlightened doctors beginning to get it, a little bit. However, most doctors are abysmally ignorant about what a healthy diet actually consists of, and at worst, they discount that diet has anything to do with your health at all.

3. Doctors are busy. For many doctors – not all of course – their education after Med school is primarily from pharmaceutical reps who are touting the benefits of their drugs. This creates a myopic perspective that does not take into account the many cutting-edge treatment possibilities outside of the well-funded pharmaceutical options.

4. Money. Unfortunately, many doctors prioritize it over integrity. The pharmaceutical companies wine and dine doctors. They sponsor vacations for them. They hold seminars where doctors are treated very, very nicely, and they talk about the benefits of their drugs. They offer discounts and promotions on their drugs, creating financial incentives for doctors to prescribe one drug over another. Meanwhile, Big Pharma’s lobbying power over our government is tremendous, so that regulatory laws are not put in place to stop these practices. At the same time, the FDA continues to block new, natural treatments with proven efficacy from entering our country.

And yet, despite all this, I am still optimistic. The system is so flawed, but there are good, educated, caring doctors out there. And what this information means is that if we want to get well, truly well, we need to educate ourselves. We cannot simply accept what your doctors tell us at face value without understanding the complexity of the system they are inside of. Healing and health and getting well is so much more vast than our doctors have the time, knowledge, understanding, or inclination to teach us. We need to take control of our health by finding out this information ourselves and using our doctors as one tool in our healing tool box, not our only source for information and treatment. If we choose to blindly follow our doctors advice, we are agreeing to be treated by a system that is severely skewed and largely corrupt. You may still choose to use pharmaceuticals to treat your illness, but do so because you’ve educated yourself on all the options first. I am not invested in how you choose to treat your illness. I am invested in making information available to as many people as possible, so that you can make wise choices for yourself and have the best possible chances to heal. I plan to do my best to bring everything I learn to you. Together, if we are willing to do the work, we can and we will get well.

Want more inspiration? Click here to read Freewheelin’ or Wheelchairin’ or go back to the main page to Get Inspired.

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From the book Light Emerging: The Journey of Personal Healing
by Barbara Ann Brennan:

An untreatable diagnosis is a statement about the medical system, not the patient. If given as a statement about the patient’s condition, it puts patients at a distinct disadvantage in their healing process. It leaves little if any room for the creative process of healing to come forth from the patient. It leaves no room for alternative care systems. It is far better when a physician says “I have done all I can for you. I am, at this time, unaware of any other treatments I can offer. If you wish, I will stand by you and keep you as comfortable as I can. Perhaps someone else knows another way.”

This is what all physicians are responsible for. They cannot take responsibility for other people’s lives or their health. Physicians cannot play God. This ought to be a relief to them. Yes, physicians have the light of God within every cell of their beings. But so does every patient. Physicians are likely to have more access to healing power than any given patient at any given time. But patients have complete ability to learn to tap into their power, which also ought to be a relief to the physician.

The responsibilities we have placed upon our physicians, and that they have shouldered, are simply neither fair nor realistic. They are based on the mechanistic model. If a physician is supposed to give us a pill or do surgery to take away something separate from us that is bothering us, then he or she becomes the responsible one. It is as if we had nothing to do with it.