The Powers and Dangers of Self-Diagnosis

Over the past few weeks, I have been feeling rather ill. My digestive system has been very upset, leading to an overall feeling of lethargy, nausea, and overall unease. As a pretty good student of my own body, I ran a few diagnostics. Okay, I really just took my temperature to make sure it wasn’t an infection of some sort. But I did start analyzing when I began to feel ill and what might have changed in that time. I’m currently subjecting myself to eliminating certain items in my diet to see if any foods may be at the root of my symptoms. While I am doing this as scientifically as I can, I am not a medical professional. That is important for me to understand. I do feel better as I go along in this investigation, but I know that all I am doing is gathering data for my doctors to use if I need further medical attention. That is one of the things that I think many of us with chronic conditions have learned over the course of living with our diseases: Come to medical appointments prepared. Self-Medicating May Miss the Underlying Problem In the spheres of social media, I read of hundreds of people who are self-diagnosing, self-prescribing, and self-medicating with no confirmation from a trained and qualified medical professional. Sure, “if I do this it hurts, so I’ll stop doing it” is a fair enough assessment of one’s own medical condition. Simply stopping the thing that provokes a symptom, however, isn’t identifying the true cause of the problem. It raises the pos...
Source: Life with MS - Category: Neurology Authors: Tags: multiple sclerosis MS doctors Symptom management trevis gleason Source Type: blogs