The Health Q&A I'd Like To Write (HAWMC #3)

WEGO Health's Day 3 challenge was to write your own health Q&A.

Q: Doesn't the fact that a bunch of doctors have failed to come up with a diagnosis after more than three years mean there's nothing wrong with you?

A: Medicine is more of an art than a science sometimes, and chances are there are more diseases out there that they don't know about yet than ones they do. It would be nice to have a label (and even nicer to have a cure or even a treatment that helped me be more functional), but there are a lot of people out there in similar straits. They don't make headlines, but there are television shows ranging from Mystery Diagnosis to House, MD that specialize in showing complicated medical cases that someone (real or fictional) has solved. I wish there were a television show that specialized in publicizing the cases of people like me who are still waiting for our diagnosis. An American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association study found that the average time for diagnosis of a serious autoimmune disease is 4.6 years. "During that period, the patient typically has seen 4.8 doctors; and 46 percent of the patients were told initially that htey were too concerned about their health or that they were chronic complainers."

Lucy Vodden, who as a young girl was the inspiration for the Beatles song Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, was sick for 10 years before finally being diagnosed with lupus. She died five years later in 2009.