Is Seeing the Doctor 400 Times Too Much?

Posted on by Here's Your Gold Watch - Rheutired

This is a cautionary story of how it can be expensive in time as well as money to know too little about your own health and treatments.

The 400 visits in the title is what it is because for seven years I went to the doctor’s office for weekly injections of methotrexate. Year after year I dealt with snow, rain, ice storms, paying for parking, dealing with the difficult receptionist and wasting time waiting. The only positive side is that I now know my doctor very well.

After that endurance contest I can say that for me the biggest advantage to being involved in a clinical trial was a conversation with a trials nurse who said “Why aren’t you doing the injecting yourself?” A classic “Had I But Known” was my answer. If I had had the faintest hint that I could have been doing it on my own I would have. This author was one of the queens of the HIBK (Had I But Known) genre That marked the last time I had someone else take care of my injections. Now with social media, people who are connected to other patients can find that answer much faster than I did.

Thinking of how many [...] continue the story

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It’s All About Control

Posted on by Here's Your Gold Watch - Rheutired

10 ways to maintain a sense of Control with a chronic illness

It’s easier to cope with chronic illness if you feel that you have some control over your life and your health. Feeling that everything is just spinning away from you makes life more difficult. Here are my first and best so far ideas. More suggestions are always welcome for a list like this. Please leave them in the comments. We all love to hear tips.

With chronic illness you are forced to be your health manager so it is up to you to gather information and to make better decisions. You need to learn skills for this complex task as you go along, because the days of good health and no worries are behind you, though there is always the hope of having them return. As you go along you will find a management style you are comfortable with.

The first suggestion I would make is to join an online group or community.  They can be a great source of information and encouragement.  It’s harder to find a physical real-time group than one that is on-line. It is also easier to spare the time for online efforts. Yahoo has a more old-school [...] continue the story

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Do It Yourself Management of Chronic Disease

Posted on by Here's Your Gold Watch - Rheutired

We can’t manage our chronic disease by ourselves, unless we quickly graduate from medical school and then become specialists. That’s not too likely with a new diagnosis that has an impact on your health. etsy NostalgicLinks However, to take a guess, even average people don’t see doctors much more than two hours over a year. And that may be a high estimate. But even if you spent a whole 24 hours out of your year seeing doctors and other health care professionals, that leaves you with the other 364 days to take care of yourself.

There is one thing I have learned on Twitter. That is that health literacy is the greatest predictor of health. In this context literacy means Grade 8 or better education. I would go further and say that with a chronic disease you need to be able to do even more – you need to learn the medical vocabulary of your disease so that the appointments you have with doctors are as effective as possible. Many of us have likely had the experience of having to wait for the next appointment to decide on a course of action because we needed time to educate ourselves on the choices [...] continue the story

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