FIBROMYALGIA SUPPORT...

This doctor needs a good week with Fibromyalgia! I believe the way a condition is handled by the medical field plays a big part in how the suffer handles the condition. A doctor who says "OK lets see what we can do to help you function, and live with this condition while we work out a attack plan" gives the patient a feeling of hope which helps you make it thru the day by day struggle. When you have to spend time and energy fighting the medical community to get them to acknowledge your condition, it takes away from the resources you need to deal with the condition. This doctor seems to be looking at things "ass backward" he needs to get over himself and take a look at the real world not colored by his ego.

I FOUND A FEW ARTICLES ON THIS DOCTOR HADLER: HERE'S ANOTHER QUOTE FROM DR. HADLER:

Dr. Nortin Hadler, professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina:

There’s a kind of pain that’s responsive to opiates and that we can suppress, the way we do for people who have terminal painful cancer and the like. And the way we do post-operatively now. There’s absolutely no reason to experience opiate-responsive pain.

But there’s another kind of pain. I call it The Suffering. And The Suffering is not opiate-responsive. We need to talk about this more and more because there is a "stamp out pain" movement in North America that I think is missing the point the way a diagnosis of fibromyalgia is missing the point. In fact, there is real suffering that’s not opiate-responsive and that relates to biochemical changes in the mind, if you will, but it’s not caused by a single receptor or a group of receptors in the brain that someday some pharmaceutical firm is going to come up with the magic bullet to eliminate. These pains are idiosyncratic, they’re learned, they’re who we are.

But there’s such a thing as ineffective suffering. And some of the illness, the morbidity, the narrative we’re talking about is ineffective suffering. So it ought to be possible to say, "Doc, is it in my mind? Is my suffering a reflection of ineffective coping?" It ought to be possible to ask that in 1998.

WOW! NOW WE'RE LEARNING HOW TO BE ILL! I GUESS WE CAN ALL LEARN TO UN-FIBROMYALGIATE! AS SOON AS ONE OF YOU FIGURES OUT HOW TO DO THAT...BE SURE TO LET US ALL KNOW! I'M GAME FOR UN-LEARNING THIS! I DON'T WANT TO BE AN "IDIOT"!
WHAT DO YOU ALL SAY?

i'm...speechless...??!!...WHAT??!!?! ...I'm laughing out loud. ...whew. uhm...ok- to give the Dr. the benefit of the doubt- I know the feeling of being misquoted in print. Surely this is a case of reporter sexin' it up- where's the fun in just facts?....or..maybe Doug (the roadie) is rite- 'the moonlanding WAS a hoax!!'...I mean- if not for the "experts" WE COULD STILL THINK PLUTO WAS A PLANET!!(not a dog.)...I think my favorite line (this was sooo beautiful!!) in this article was another expert's comment about how 'the more they're around the medical community "the sicker they get."' ....Wow!...Thank you!....wow doug. ... All i can say to the Dr.'s is- if you turned out to be wrong- would the extra suffering you caused those already in great pain bother you? ....."first do no harm"...does it occur 2 u that u charge us 4 this?? Job prayed 4 his friends. May God help you. And us all. (when do dr.s stop "practicing"?) I feel like I took the car in to Joe to check out. And instead of fixing anything he said "you're fat & stupid & whatever's rong is your fault. cause you're bad. &ugly. That'll be $500." Then i say thank you sir. and pay.-----mr.dr.man-could you ever believe me when i tell you how WRONG you are?! All that education just to end up hurtin people?! ......pluto's not a planet . And i better not say it is.

One thing I did try to do was find this doctor's research or articles and I still have not had any such luck... only keep finding more of his idiosyncratic comments on how he believes FM sufferers have learned to get worse! I can't even find the work where he is sited. If anyone finds it, let us know.
It is a sad, sad day for us FM sufferers when a so called "professional" of the medical society can just blurt out such theories... and even worse a day when quoted in the New York Times!

Hi All,

I actually started researching Dr. Hadler a few months ago because a Dr. on Revolution Health was spouting his garbage and it irritated me. I blogged about it (http://theiciexperience.blogspot.com/ 2007/09/be-well-not-medicalized-for-fm. html) a lot and I'm not through yet. This whole NYT thing is just adding fuel to my fire.

Hadler has a book, "The Last Well Person, How to Stay Well Despite the Health-Care System" in which he pisses a lot of people off. FM is BRIEFLY mentioned. I was led to believe that there was a whole chapter on FM. There isn't.

The entire state of Georgia has only one copy of this book. I put in a request for it and got it a couple of weeks ago. I'm just making copies of the pages where FM is mentioned. It will take awhile for me to figure out what he's saying, partly because he uses a lot of medical jargon and partly because he's just hard to read. I mean who would use five commas in a 14 word sentence if they were really trying to speak so people would understand? It is supposed to be written so lay people will read, I take from the title.

This article in the Journal of Rheumatology seems to be his claim to fame as far as FM goes: view link It's titled ""Fibromyalgia" and the Medicalization of Misery."

JAMA review of the book, view link

Another review of the book (with a lovely pic of the doc), view link

Sherril.