Many years ago, I had a patient with schizophrenia who, when she was well, was an affable homemaker and loving wife. But when unwell, she would transmogrify into an aggressive, unreasoning person with a particular paranoid delusion about her husband.
Unfortunately, she was prone to such relapses of her illness because she was frequently non- compliant with her medication despite repeated efforts to educate her on the need to take her pills.
For the first year of my illness I lied about my symptoms because I believed in telepathy and thought what i was going through was natural. I thought I was supposed to hide it because everybody else was. Alas that was the wrong move. My hospital visits probably would have been more helpful if I had known what was going on.
Having been hurt by mislead professionals at my most vulnerable point in my adult life…I must agree with firemonkey…the doctor does not necessarily always know best either.
I’ve been on med’s for over twenty-five years, and yet I still have a little voice inside me that doesn’t want to take them, even after all that has happened to me when I was off them.
I think having my experience with college made me respect those who had gone through harder courses. I know that a psychiatrist has earned it. Also my uncle has a PhD and my dad and step mom have JD’s. I’ve had friends who worked at a law school library and with the law professors. I still know there are some good and some bad in every profession. I do know that where I live now is not where you want to go under the knife. If I need surgery I’m going to the big cities for that.
Didn’t read the article, but I’ve been in many situations that the Drs didn’t always know best. I knew from personal experience. So it works both ways,
This part stood out for me with respect to what is happening with my son’s grandmother She is suffering from some sort of PTSD/psychosis from her heart attacks.
This relatively small study was conducted on 63 hospitalised patients with either serious illnesses like Aids, pneumonia, cancer and heart failure, or who had undergone major surgery such as a coronary heart bypass. The patients were first found to be mentally competent on a test called the Mini Mental Status Examination.
But when they were given a series of seven cognitive tests, they performed in the manner of children below 10 years of age.
The authors commented that the finding “does not mean that they are childish; rather they are in a state of sickness”.
Precisely how this “state of sickness” rendered these adult patients to this regressive state is not known.
Although the study has its limitations and its findings are preliminary, it suggests that the trauma of being acutely ill, the disorientating effect of being in hospital, and the effects of medications and surgery might act in some ways and stricken a person’s mental faculty in a more covert way.
Patients may not always know best. Nobody always knows best. But the autonomy of the person is supported by law to at least some extent in most countries in the world. That means that the individual has the right to make the wrong decision.
And that’s very important to the preservation of all our freedoms,
I was burned many times by incompetent doctors - No many do not know it all and some know very little but still practice medicine - I think that one has to be lucky to find a really good pdoc - I may have gotten lucky with my current pdoc
She is suffering from some sort of PTSD/psychosis from her heart attacks.