by Dr. Manon | About Your Health
In my last post I raised the broad statistical costs of the war of symptoms. But what about the impact on the individual patient? This “war” is waged against part of the body and has just a partially “functioning body” as its best outcome. That...
by Dr. Manon | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In my last post I left off by raising the question of what doctors can do to change the misguided and harmful obsession with symptom relief in our healthcare system. The first step may well be simply coming to terms with the situation. For most people in the Western...
by Dr. Manon | About Your Health
In recent posts I explained the limitations of popular current ideas of health as merely the absence of symptoms. Do doctors have a role in expanding the expectations of what is considered health? Can we broaden patients’ views on health or are we merely...
by Dr. Manon | About Your Health
I left off my last post promising an example that illustrated the difference between achieving good health and merely relieving symptoms. Consider the sale of over-the-counter headache drugs. These may get rid of yours symptoms, but you are still a person with...
by Dr. Manon | About Your Health
In my last post I contrasted mainstream health institutions’ attitude to health with the definition of the World Health Organization: “complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” It is evident...
by Dr. Manon | About Your Health
Understanding the patient’s purpose in coming to you is paramount for a doctor. The Latin root of “doctor” means “to educate,” but this often falls short of the mandate. We must educate patients about their symptoms, as well as the...
by Dr. Manon | About Your Health
In my last post I made the point that doctors who allowed their assumption of detached objectivity to blind them to the meaning of their patients’ objectives and objections were missing out on a valuable venue for recovering health. The patients’...
by Dr. Manon | About Your Health
In recent posts I’ve established that patients have their objectives or agendas in their illness, which is revealed in the meaning they attach to symptoms, uncovered in their descriptions. In light of the objectives and objections of the patient, what is the...
by Dr. Manon | About Your Health
I have spent my last several posts discussing the shortcoming of standard approaches to the subjective dimension of the SOAP formula. In the next series of post I’ll address the “O”: objective! The doctor’s task conventionally is noting the...
by Dr. Manon | About Your Health
My last post recounted an experience with an MS patient who seemed to prefer her disease to being cured because of the greater attentiveness and intimacy she felt it stirred in her husband. Not all patients will be so clear about their unconscious driving forces, but...
by Dr. Manon | About Your Health
Early in my practice, I saw a patient, a psychologist, who had developed MS six months prior. She arrived in a wheelchair, guided in by her husband, who was also a patient of mine. I conducted a 2-hour interview and felt fairly certain of the treatment. A mere six...
by Dr. Manon | About Your Health
In my last post I introduced two patients with sequelae of polio. A male patient was looking to improve his condition so as to care for his wife who developed Alzheimer’s and a female patient want to improve her conditions so that she would not be compelled to...
by Dr. Manon | About Your Health
For a second illustration of how important is a patient’s subjective meaning of their symptoms, I want to compare two different patients affected with the sequelae of polio. Both received the same treatment. I treated them both with a technique called...
by Dr. Manon | About Your Health
In my last two posts I introduced the case study of a 67-year-old whose subjective experience of her diagnosis was continually ignored by the objective assessment and plan of a health care regime that was oblivious to her story of her injury. (Reviewing the past two...
by Dr. Manon | Addressing Your Pain
In my last post I introduced the case study of a 67-year-old whose subjective experience of her diagnosis left her so unsatisfied that her story of the incident actually changed. (Rereading the prior post might offer a helpful refresher.) This was just the beginning...
by Dr. Manon | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
I promised over the next several posts to explore some examples of the innate knowledge in the meaning that patients’ read into their illness. The first is a 67-year-old female who fractured her patella bracing herself from a fall. When first interviewed, the...
by Dr. Manon | About Your Health
In my last post we looked at how the subjective description of a patient’s condition actually embodied much more knowledge about a patient’s condition than is commonly recognized. This could be a valuable resource for a doctor. How does such knowledge...
by Dr. Manon | About Your Health
I concluded my last post emphasizing that the patient’s subjective presentation of symptoms does not exist in a vacuum. I pointed out that patients often describe what their condition based on what they “feel” is happening, or with fear of what they...
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