I Canceled My Free Health Check Up And This Is Why

On past Friday, Coventry, my health care provider called me and made an appointment on past Monday, for a nurse's visit with equipments to check me up, for free. I agreed first then after a day's serious thought I canceled it. Why? Because I already knew what would be the outcome: everything is fine, even beautiful, bloody pressure, breath, heart rate, weight, height, etc..

Am I fine? I had two angina attacks during the past 3 weeks, the first one was severe, but only lasted hours, the second one was less severe, but lasted more than a day. So why didn't I go to hospital? because if I did, chances were "Mei He (aka Yun Yi) died from heart attack on the way to the ER". Hey, my reader friends, I am not kidding, because to ease my chest pain I needed completely rest, water, and good foods, and all of these were not likely provided by the heroic rescuing, by putting me on stretcher that undulates its way into ambulance which turbulently rushing into hospital. I would not die by heart attack, but I am sure I would die in that way during my heart attack. (I know not everybody would die like me because everyone's strength or resistance is different, and my resistance to such struggle is almost zero!)

Modern society is complicated cooperative system, that each of us take care different things (experts!). This is great because I learned that we humans are good team-workers and that's one of reasons we survived and prospered. But for personal health care, I doubt how much good this cooperation would do. I doubt how much good this marvellous and formidable edifice of modern medicine and health care would to do each individual, except making most people more and more dependent regarding their own health, more and more ignorant about how their own bodies work.

I think medicare system might be good for majority, because most of human beings do follow some certain principles. But I also have reason to believe, that as each individual becomes more and more unique, human race is becoming a more heterogeneous collection, which can be very hard to deal with by general principles, like what modern medicine has been doing.

During my past over 10 years of health struggle, I had been told by doctors again and again that I was perfectly fine, all my test reports were not only fine but fabulous, even when I was in extremely dreadful condition. So I quit seeing doctors, and put health in my own hand. Since then I've been making real progress, slowly, almost only discernible by myself (all people who know me pretty much give up the hope that I could be well). Indeed, without help, I paid tremendous price for each piece I found to solve this monstrous puzzle, but each piece I found is solid and without any "side effects". Early this year, I reached such a great condition that I even thought I was out of darkness "eventually", but I slipped unfortunately again over two month ago. However once again, I am on the way up, and I believe I will be in an even better place than previous time.
Am I really this confident? Yes, because my health care is completely in my own hands.

P.S. Having said all of this, I still objectively keep an option that is I would never be completely healthy again. But even that, I know is still a better condition than to give myself to medical profession.

How Much We Know Ourselves By Science

Old Chinese medical chart on acupuncture meridians (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In her book "The fate of Chinese medicine" (temporary translation of 问中医几度秋凉), Ai Ning told the story of her father, who was doctor also a "die hard" believer of science and modern medicine. He got some disease when he was 60 year-old and did not get help from modern medicine. Out of desperation, he accepted treatment of Chinese medicine and he was "magically" cured. So his mind was in great confusion because he thought by theory he knew exactly what's wrong and believed that he should have cured by "science". After this experience, he gave up fighting against Chinese medicine. In conclusion, Author said this:

"If in this world we only had one medicine theory (implies modern medicine), he (father) would die without regret. But ironically, Chinese medicine let him lived with perplexity."

Sick or Not, Who Decides?

As modern medicine evolved into this formidably complicated ("obese" is a better word) system - from theory to practice, from financial/labor investment to sky high price, modern people seem to completely yield themselves to medicine authority, for any trivial issues to serious ones, unquestionably listen to doctors, depend on doctors, and no longer listen to their own bodies, no longer depend on themselves.

We have annual check up, if the results said you have this or that disease, you would believe totally, and take whatever treatments doctors assigned to you, even if you felt completely nothing wrong with your daily physical function. And sooner or later you may still felt nothing different but, after going back check up again, doctor told you that numbers were all good now, then you certainly believed that, felt happy that all your suffering was over, even though all you suffered during the "illness" was "taking pills". On the other hand, there are a huge amount of people who claim being sick, or even chronically sick, but doctors could never find anything wrong with them. So these "sick people" have to do "doctor shopping" again and again, the result was the same: the numbers (of check up) are all "beautiful". At this point doctors usually would suggest that the patients' feeling ill was "imagined". So here comes mental issue: how is your personal life? Have you been feeling depressed?

Usually this type of "patients" with "beautiful numbers" have two choices: listening to doctors and take those anti-depressant and get sicker and sicker, or, refused to accept doctors' assumptions about mental illness and put the health into their own hands. I am one of the latter who refused to admit I was mentally ill. After a few attempts (back 10 years ago) trying to get helps from cardiologists I pretty much realized they could do nothing good for me. Even though after all these years I am still not completely recovered yet, I have no doubt that I will reach that day, sooner or later.

I also know many people who listened doctors' suggestions ("mental illness") and ended up with disastrous consequence. One of examples is Sophia Mirza (1), who died in 2005 with CFS when she was 29. Before she was died, she was treated as a mental ill patient. According to Wiki: "Mirza's physical symptoms were treated as a mental condition and her carers were accused of 'enabling' her. In July 2003 Mirza was sectioned for two weeks by her doctors, who believed her condition was psychosomatic, an action which her mother believed severely worsened her condition". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_Mirza) 
I personally believe that the death of Sophia Mirza was mostly caused by medical treatments.

There are tones of other patients who followed medical experts also had very serious consequence. Many of them could not even handle their daily life. And the chronic conditions last not only months, but years, some of them decades (mine is over 10 years). When these patients realized that listening do doctors was essentially wrong, usually it was very late. For some of them they it was indeed "too late".

Most people believe that science of modern medicine knows everything about our bodies, so they naturally believe that if doctors find nothing wrong with a person, this person must imagined his/her illness. Many "normal" people don't even know that there exists a huge population of "invisible disease patients" (I don't remember where I've read that the population of invisible disease patients in US are approximately 1 million). This, is so unfair to most unknown illness patients, because not only they don't get any helps from professionals (2), but also they don't get much mental support. They have to live not only with physical suffering, but also mental isolation, misunderstanding, social stigma and prejudice (many of them even come from family members). (I have many personal stories about this so just don't let me start...)

I think, the real blind spot is, after human mind evolved for so long time, we have been so amazed by left hemisphere of human brain (reason) that we forgot our right side brain (feeling, sense) is the "real boss" (I actually tend to believe that many people pretty much lost the ability to "feel" over the course of "civilization"). I believe, as far as our physical health is concerned, we better follow how our bodies feel than to depend on the numbers of check up by machine. This is not to say that I don't believe in science, nor to say that the numbers checked by machines are all useless, but only mean that the function of our bodies are way more complicated than what modern medical science can cover (so far), so better we use professionals' opinions as references, in many cases, if not all cases.

Modern society is a complicated machine, in which people work in different "parts". Modern cultures create "experts" in different fields, and these experts usually know nothing about others fields. Humans become more and more like tools that work in different separate parts of modern machine: lawyer, engineer, doctor (and among doctors we have eye doctor, lung doctor, cardiologist, dentist, etc.). My experience told me, that if we really know nothing about the fields outside of our own professions, and completely trust those experts, we easily end up with huge mistakes when we do "business" with them (I had bad business with lawyer, car mechanics, etc.), and the fault is our own. Since health is most crucial to our lives, doubtlessly, the biggest mistake we could ever make is to completely trust medical experts, ignoring completely what our won bodies telling us.




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1: More information about Sophia Mirza:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJvFwhW3FUY

2: For me this is acceptable because I actually believe many illnesses are "personal", so it's up to patients themselves to cure.

Diseases vs. Health

Image by NVinacco via FlickrWatching tennis tournaments such as Wimbledon is always a joy to me, and mostly because of Roger Federer. However, I am not writing about tennis nor tennis stars in my health blog, instead, I am writing down my little thought about "disease" and health, triggered by my favorite tennis star.

It was said that Federer has a disease called "mononucleosis". Such a fancy/serious name(!) which I wish I could have and "proudly" present to those who question my health problems. But the fact is I do not have a name for my "problems" (if we don't count "chronic fatigue"). To many medical experts this means I have no problems after all.

Really, modern medicine found me in perfect shape, even though in many cases I could not stand up still for a few minutes, yet modern medicine can find problems such as "mononucleosis" (not sure how serious it is, but at least with a NAME) on persons like Roger Federer, who can play tennis for hours!

I am not saying that Federer doesn't have this disease, or this disease doesn't exist, what I am trying to say is that modern medicine seems to care only about "diseases", not "health". In other words, modern medicine can kill diseases, but not necessarily bring health to people.

I recently know a person, an elder Chinese guy who only eat one meal (dinner) a day, yet he is in great physical shape (he could act normal even without sleep for a whole night, or a couple of nights. he could go hiking 12 hours without any trouble). I was quite amazed and talked about this to a friend who is working professionally in medical field of diabetes. She was actually a little worried about this guy by saying: "well, don't be fooled by your eye. He might not have a good results if he took a blood check."

Then I had to think: I had "perfect" reports of blood checks almost everytime, but I am not nearly as healthy as this guy, who might not have a "beautiful" blood report like mine. So here comes my question: who should we trust: our body, or the report of blood check?

My answer is simple: of course we should trust our body. A perfect blood check report doesn't necessarily tell us how healthy we are, because (again) modern medicine is focused on "diseases" only, it doesn't care about "health". Of course, I am not trying to denounce modern medicine, but simply point out a fact which I firmly believe: there is a huge blind (even dangerous) spot on its conventional theory, experiment and practice.

Is human a machine? --- some thoughts about modern medicine

Image via Wikipedia

I am currently reading the book "The history of knowledge" by Charles Van Doren (even though I have not read many history books I still cannot help to say it's one of greatest history books I personally have ever read! Brilliant!). In chapter 8 "the Invention of scientific method" the author talked about how those geniuses' discoveries and ideas contributed to the later revolutions in Europe. One of the biggest idea changes at the time was the fact that people realized that our mind could truly understand the nature - the nature that works as a machine. Of course this idea was not new but at the time it was encouraged tremendously by Newton's mechanics. And one of scientific fields that was encouraged the most was modern medicine.

This part of reading inevitably induced my further thinking of modern medicine. Now, looking back, was it if not a mistake but a short-sighted perspective to consider human as a machine? My answer is "yes". Not only my personal experience but millions of other unknown diseases sufferers' situations already proved that this immensely complicated modern medicine system has been not enough to take care of us as it claims. It is getting very clear that even though each parts of our bodies can work perfectly fine but as a whole they just don't work as they are supposed to. So it is reasonable to say that by focusing on studying parts of our bodies like parts of a machines simply is not enough to deal with something as complicated as human.

Again I am not crazy about Chinese medicine but, there is one thing I believe very valuable about it - Chinese medicine consider our body as a holistic being. It was this view led Chinese medicine into a "superstitious" way because it believed that there was some "magic" power inside this complicated system - our bodies knew better how to cope with diseases than our minds did. There is a popular saying within Chinese medicine practitioners: Chinese medicine doesn't cure disease, it just helps our bodies recovering to a decent condition so they can cure disease by themselves.

As I have not really taken much advantage of Chinese medicine, I really don't have much proof myself to say how effective Chinese medicine is, but I do believe there is some truth inside of it, as thousands years of experience/practice is not something we could just ignore by claiming it as superstition just because we don't understand it.

Also, I do not mean to underestimate the achievement of modern medicine. I truly respect science and I believe the discovery of human body's mechanical functions was truly amazing at the time. However, I believe this achievement is only the first step of medicine. Now, medicine faces new challenges. As more and more unknown diseases comes out, medicine institutions will be demanded to rethink their starting point - the mechanical view on human, which by my belief is the true reason why modern medince is so clueless when deal with some new dieseases - and widen their perspective, develop some new methods and solution for diseases.

“Hypochondria”: truth behind the pseudo-science

Image via Wikipedia

There are always people out there who are gifted with imagination: talking to Jesus Christ, meeting with God; or, having muscle spasm, heart irregular beating, or, difficulty of breath, etc. The former is called religious so we could freely doubt their factuality, but the latter is nothing to do with belief --- it is called “hypochondria”, “diagnosed” by physicians and psychologists and accepted by most people as a “scientific fact”.

When I first saw this word I did not pay much attention. However when I was chronic sick and could not get a descent diagnose and treatment, I started to doubt the authenticity of this term. Personally I have never been diagnosed as “hypochondria”, but if I had kept “doctor shopping”, I might have been sent to psychiatrists long time ago.

I have finished two readings recently: “Wellness, piece by piece” by Pat Sullivan; “Never be sick again” by Raymond Francis. The former is a well-known entrepreneur who was seriously ill. He was told by many doctors that his illness was created by his imagination. However, he did not buy that. Instead, out of his own effort he was eventually recovered. The author of the second book was a successful biologist who also was deadly ill. Once he was even “sentenced” to death by physicians. But just like Pat Sullivan he was cured later by using his own knowledge. Even though I do not agree with everything they said in these 2 books, I agree with them (especially Raymond Francis) with this thought: modern western medicine is not as efficient as most people believe. As matter of fact, lots of treatments do more harm than good to human bodies.

Thus my doubt to the word “hypochondria” increased. Let’s examine the definition first.

“Hypochondria is a belief that real or imagined physical symptoms are signs of a serious illness, despite medical reassurance and other evidence to the contrary.”
https://health.google.com/health/ref/Hypochondria

“Somatoform disorder, characterized by imagined sufferings of physical illness or, more generally, an exaggerated concern with one’s physical health. The hypochondriac typically displays a preoccupation with bodily functions such as heart rate, sweating, bowel and bladder functions, and the occasional minor problem like pimples, headaches, a simple cough, etc. all such trivialities are interpreted as signs of symptoms of more serious diseases. “doctor shopping” is common, assurances of health are futile.”*1
(There are many more definitions you can find online or books.)

For all these explanations, we could find two premises: 1, imagination of patients; 2, the illness patients claimed are undetectable. The first premise is at fault without any further study, because we all know that there is no way we could tell whether human’s imagination is truth or not (otherwise there would be no disputes about God’s existence). So the real premise of this definition is the second one: undetectable. That means, patients were “accused” to imagining illness ONLY because doctors could not find what’s wrong. I personally believe that only under ONE condition they can do so: modern medicine is a perfect science --- it knows human body (and mind) completely and it needs no more progress. But we all know this is not true. Human beings catch new diseases everyday and even within the existing diseases, there are still many of them are untreatable. That’s why what doctors really should do when they facing undetectable illness is: admitting the limitation of medicine, instead of “victim blame”.
In the book “Never be sick again”，Raymond Francis said：

“Physicians often assume that if they do not understand what is wrong, their ignorance is not at fault, but rather the patient is imagining the problem.”*2
“ A few suggested that I was hypochondriac, imagining ill health. Many physicians assume that if they do not understand what is wrong, the patient must be imagining his illness.” *2

Our knowledge is always (maybe forever) limited compare with the reality. That’s why modern medicine need to develop and progress. So to judge unlimited reality by using our limited knowledge and experience is truly an attitude of ignorance.

As life style changes more and more people caught many unknown diseases. Chronic fatigue syndrome is one of them. It is also one of most misunderstood and misdiagnosed diseases. Because of lots of doctors and psychologists hold modern medicine as “religion”, they truly believe that these patients has mental issues. Since these patients are treated as mental patients, they have to take wrongly prescription like anti-depressants and other drugs. Thus their already very weak immune system are completely damaged, their physical condition worsen.

An English young woman Sophia Miaza is one extreme example of this treatment. Her illness was diagnosed as mental and she dead at very young age. Here is the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mZMpvtD3rg

As more and more people got CFS (Chronic fatigue syndrome), more and more CFS patients stand up for themselves, some open-minded scientists/experts started to study these unknown diseases and some new theories started challenge conventional medicine. By Raymond Francis, one of the most important reason for the failure of western medicine on so many diseases is, modern medicine takes symptoms as enemy, thus ignore the more important or the only effective fact --- causes:

Modern medicine has a poor understanding of disease and relies on suppressing the symptoms of disease rather than addressing its true cause. (see *2)　

Another limitation (if not mistake) of modern medicine is that it separates human body into parts, so it has to deal with disease separately. But the truth is human body is a holistic being, partial problems are usually related, or caused by other parts or, the whole body function. But since modern medicine study human diseases by separate them to different categories, it doubtlessly leads to some bewildering results: undetectable; unexplainable or, a more face saving “solution”: hypochondria.

…breaking medicine up into medical specialities becomes obsolete and counterproductive. (see *2)

Of course I do not mean the partial studies of modern medicine is worthless. What I believe is the study of parts should work only for partial problems, or it should only help understanding the whole. It cannot be taken as the only right pathway to deal with everything.*3

By Raymond Francis, the author of “Never be sick again”, modern medicine made disease way too complicated than what it actual is. He thinks that we human only have “one disease”, which is “cell mis-function”; only two causes: nutrition deficiency and toxicity. I personally cannot judge the scientific accuracy of this theory but I appreciate its revolutionary perspective and I believe it would be a profound impact on traditional western medicine.

Beside “imagination”, another blameful factor of undetectable diseases is “depression”. Depression causes body illness is another wild spread and accepted “scientific fact”. I actually believe there is truth about it and I do not deny our mental conditions can interfere our physical function, however, I doubt it as the only or primary cause for all baffled unknown physical diseases, as most physicians do.

"We should not confuse the fact that the vast majority of fatigue patients are depressed because of chronic illness, not chronically ill because they are depressed. This is a very important distinction and (one) that most doctors fail to draw … to treat the depression as causing the whole illness is wrong!" *4

Many emerging illnesses, before they have gained acceptance by the medical community, have initially been discounted as being hysteria, depression, somatoform disorders, etc. One hundred years ago, polio was dismissed in just that fashion.
http://www.cfs-news.org/faq.htm#2S

At the end of this writing, I like to share some information about the origin of the word “hypochondria”. “Hypochondria” originally didn’t mean “disease phobia”, but an actual disease found by ancient Greeks:

The word hypochondria is derived from the ancient Greek terms hypo, which means below, and chondros, which means cartilage, and it refers to a set of symptoms which were thought to have been caused by a disorder of the anatomical organs beneath the cartilages of the ribs.

In fact, “symptom phobia” or “preoccupation with imagined illness” could be much more accurate than “hypochondria”, but I think the reason of choosing “hypochondria”, in addition to its sarcastic effect on those “superstitious Greeks”, might be because this discovery of ancient Greek did not pass the test of “modern medicine". But whether this theory passes the test of truth or not, is certainly not the concern of those who take modern medicine as “God”.

Life is short. We all want to fill our time with enjoyments. I simply didn’t believe from the beginning that so many people would spend time on endless “doctor shopping” just by imagining their illness. Labeling those people with unknown disease as “hypochondriacs” is absolutely a behavior out of arrogance of conventional western medicine. Blaming patients imagination just because of the limitation of medicine study is pseudo-science.
And needless to mention, as the consequence of this “modern superstition”, millions of patients not only suffer from physical pain, mistreatment, but also misunderstanding even disrespect from families, friends, and society.
The hope is, more and more open-minded scientists/ specialists started to put efforts into studies of these “undetectable” diseases (I saw CFS patients interviews on Dr. OZ show). And more and more patients started to take advantage of internet to stand up for themselves, to speak out, to tell people the truth behind their “imagined illness”.

As a long term CFS sufferer, I hope one day I could see the term “hypochondria” disappears from psychology dictionary. In medicine dictionary, I hope one day this word no longer stand for “symptom phobia”, but some real physical diseases that receive right diagnoses and treatments.



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*1.Dictionary of psychology, by Arthur s. Reber, Penguin, 1995
*2.Never be sick again, by Raymond Francis, Health communication, Inc. 2002
*3.I have to give credit to Chinese medicine on this account, even though I do not believe it completely from scientific perspective.
*4.A that I found is that so many physically healthy people have depression. One person I known had severe anxiety but he didn’t even get insomnia.
*5.Wellness, piece by piece, Pat Sullivan, Health Press NA Inc., 2005

*6.http://users.sa.chariot.net.au/~posture/HypochondriaWebpage.html