Much has been about said about empowering and educating patients to be partners in the healthcare dance. From the e-patient and e-health revolutions through the piles of research showing more engaged patients have better outcomes, all seem to point a more active role and increased responsibility for the patient in his or her own care. But how does that work when the illness is not clearly defined, is not easily diagnosed or for which effective treatments are limited? What does it mean to be an empowered patient with an invisible illness?
This is the question that many women face on a regular basis. Indeed, for a number of predominantly female disorders, whether hormonally modulated or not, there are often many years before the symptoms are addressed as real and not figments of the female imagination. Chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia are two such examples, but so are endometriosis and an array of other perhaps more subtle hormone conditions.
During those years before modern medicine and the research community recognize the reality that define a particular disease process; during the years when women are prescribed psychiatric meds for non psychiatric conditions; during the years when pain medications with diverse side-effect profiles blur the line between the original disease and the one that is induced pharmacologically; during those years, how does one become the e-patient, the e-woman, without becoming a physician herself?
Really, we want to know.
Keep Reading
You might be interested in
