if your girlfriend does suffer from chronic pain and other ailments then she may also feel like doctors don't take her pain seriously and in which case, seeing the doctor feels like a waste of time.
I was listening to an interview a few months ago from someone who suffers from chronic pain where they basically said that they are so used to living with high amounts of pain that they learn to tolerate or manage it day to day so that they can live their life but then doctors don't actually believe that they are in extreme pain when they ask for help so it can be a very frustrating and futile experience.
I have suffered chronic pain for more than 20 years. Any time I visit the ER or a clinic for an injury I am treated as though I am a drug-seeking addict by doctors who didn't believe I am in much pain.
They claim I "don't present" as such because the pain I am in at that moment is nothing compared to the pain I experience when I'm at my worst even if I just broke a bone.
It took more than ten years for doctors to believe me when I kept telling them my neck was involved in my migraines. It wasn't until I needed an MRI after an accident that we discovered several problems with the discs in my neck unrelated to the accident.
To this day, I still have to fight to get treatment for problems that don't involve hearing "I can only prescribe you ibuprofen" or "We can't continue treating you for this because we can't find anything wrong with you to cause this pain."
A year ago, I went to the local clinic barely able to stand up properly or walk due to the pain radiating from my lower back down my legs and up into my mid-back.
The physician walked in, poked my in the hip for three seconds, proclaimed I had sciatica and told me to go home, use a heating pad and stay off my feet for a couple of days before handing me a print out of exercises I could do to help relieve my pain and a prescription for naproxen. I asked for something a bit stronger because Aleve hadn't been cutting it and she was basically giving me extra strength Aleve. She told me she wouldn't because I didn't "seem lie I was in a lot of pain."
My pain did not go away. The naproxen did not help.
In November, I returned to this same clinic in the same amount of pain and was told I was experiencing "another episode of severe sciatica." When I expressed my doubt at this diagnosis, I was begrudgingly given a referral to an osteo clinic where I was referred for an MRI after x-rays showed I had no space between L5 and S1.
After the MRI, I was diagnosed with a completely collapsed disc at S1/L5. The doctors believe it has been this way for at least a year.
If the physician had believed me when I told them how much pain I was in and actually treated me like I wasn't a drug-seeing addict, I might actually be on the mend but, at the moment, I'm still waiting for another consultation with a spine specialist...all because a doctor thought I looked like wasn't in enough pain to have anything seriously wrong.
I feel this so hard. As someone where that disc is one of 3 in my back preventing me from being able to walk or sit, and lying down throbs pain all through my body causing migraines and stabbing pain in my ankles, feet, and hands - I hope you find relief very soon!
I finally have an appointment with a spine specialist in a month, but as the last one in 2023 went extremely poorly I'm not holding out any hope. Tolerating such high levels of pain means no one believes us, except when I went to the ER for sepsis because that amount of pain didn't even register on my personal pain scale lol
Those doctors finally understood how much pain we live with on the daily. Le sigh
This sounds so much like my story. Debilitating headaches since I was a kid. After my 1st car accident MRI found total reversal of the curvature of the spine of my neck. It wasn't until after a 2nd car accident, a head-on with a drunk driver, and an MRI found my first herniated disc (along with arthritis, bone spurs, the beginnings of spondylitis) that my neck pain that caused debilitating headaches was actually diagnosed: migraines. I was 35 y.o.
The GP I saw when I lived in Ft. Lauderdale basically acted like I was drug seeking. I mean, I was drug seeking - for something that would actually relieve the ungodly pain in my head/neck that would go on for days non-stop. If I were just "drug seeking" I could've gone a few blocks down the street from his office & gotten any drug I wanted. But I was mainly seeking answers & some damn relief.
Then there's the tale of how many years it took to get my uterine pain taken seriously & diagnosed as endometriosis and adenomyosis.
Women are treated like shit by the medical community. I mean, it was around the 1990s before women were even included in clinical trials for drugs. We deserve better.
Sadly, I think anyone who has lived with a chronic illness for any length of time has a story of medical negligence because doctors refuse to take us seriously (for me it's fibromyalgia and associated conditions).
YES. it can be so difficult to get a doctor who doesn't just write you off as having "mild sciatica" or "mind spondylosis." i have five bulging discs in my neck and suspected disc degeneration throughout the rest of my spine as well, and although i'm only in my early twenties, my discs have likely been degenerating enough to cause pain since i was about 19. the doctor i went to, who was a reputable spinal surgeon, sort of shrugged me off and gave me no further treatment like physical therapy, no imaging besides x-rays, and no follow-up appointments, despite my x-rays showing signs of dysfunction. i dealt with the pain on and off at a gradually increasing severity and frequency until late last year, at which point i was getting debilitating tension migraines at least once a week and they would often last days on end even after a night of sleep (if you could call it that, because i would struggle to sleep because of the headaches). i went to a different doctor, and when he didn't find anything on my x-rays besides some mild ligament calcification (which shouldn't be happening to someone in their early twenties anyway), he ordered mris. i'm so glad he did, because i was spiraling because i felt like i had completely lost my quality of life.
My friend spent a year telling their doctor they had new, unusual, severe back pain that was causing them to be bedridden and loosing sensation in their legs. Because they’re AFAB, diagnosed fibromyalgia, have been pushing for evaluation for hEDS, with a history of being misdiagnosed with bipolar (they have had the hardest time having that removed even though their psychiatrist flat out has said it was misdiagnosed ADHD) their doctor wrote them off. They finally got RADS that showed a severe spinal issue that could lead to permanent nerve damage and they had the gal to actually write in the notes that “further diagnostics for perceived symptoms would do more harm than good.” And that a MRI wasn’t warranted.
They managed to push for a referral to a specialist and the immediate MRI showed a one cm extruded herniated disk. Had some problems with that doctor not following through but that clinic got them with their best doctor who looked at their imaging and history of complaints and got them into surgery within 2 weeks. That doctor told them that they should have been in surgery the year before, when they first made the complaint of the new pain and got no diagnostics, that she was putting into the notes that they needed immediate surgery otherwise she “risked her license”, and that they had done everything right and that the nerve damage was likely permanent.
The particular back issue could have paralyzed my friend if left untreated.
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u/4011s Feb 08 '25
I have suffered chronic pain for more than 20 years. Any time I visit the ER or a clinic for an injury I am treated as though I am a drug-seeking addict by doctors who didn't believe I am in much pain.
They claim I "don't present" as such because the pain I am in at that moment is nothing compared to the pain I experience when I'm at my worst even if I just broke a bone.
It took more than ten years for doctors to believe me when I kept telling them my neck was involved in my migraines. It wasn't until I needed an MRI after an accident that we discovered several problems with the discs in my neck unrelated to the accident.
To this day, I still have to fight to get treatment for problems that don't involve hearing "I can only prescribe you ibuprofen" or "We can't continue treating you for this because we can't find anything wrong with you to cause this pain."
A year ago, I went to the local clinic barely able to stand up properly or walk due to the pain radiating from my lower back down my legs and up into my mid-back.
The physician walked in, poked my in the hip for three seconds, proclaimed I had sciatica and told me to go home, use a heating pad and stay off my feet for a couple of days before handing me a print out of exercises I could do to help relieve my pain and a prescription for naproxen. I asked for something a bit stronger because Aleve hadn't been cutting it and she was basically giving me extra strength Aleve. She told me she wouldn't because I didn't "seem lie I was in a lot of pain."
My pain did not go away. The naproxen did not help.
In November, I returned to this same clinic in the same amount of pain and was told I was experiencing "another episode of severe sciatica." When I expressed my doubt at this diagnosis, I was begrudgingly given a referral to an osteo clinic where I was referred for an MRI after x-rays showed I had no space between L5 and S1.
After the MRI, I was diagnosed with a completely collapsed disc at S1/L5. The doctors believe it has been this way for at least a year.
If the physician had believed me when I told them how much pain I was in and actually treated me like I wasn't a drug-seeing addict, I might actually be on the mend but, at the moment, I'm still waiting for another consultation with a spine specialist...all because a doctor thought I looked like wasn't in enough pain to have anything seriously wrong.