Annoying crap people will say re: your mystery health issue

chronic unexplained illness, US healthcare system
After you've spent a few months/years wandering through the medical system with a complaint no one can help you with -- hair loss, psoriasis, fatigue, dizzy spells, insomnia, whatever -- you start to hear the same refrains from supposedly well-meaning doctors and civilians. Read More Annoying crap people will say re: your mystery health issue
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Chronic illness and “nice” people

chronic unexplained illness, The Weird
I recently started thinking again about a phenomenon I first experienced at the nadir of my health woes 14 years ago, and several times since. I wondered briefly about it each time it happened, but was too beleaguered and distracted to dwell on it. To wit: on several occasions I developed noticeable symptoms over a short period of time that were visible to others. Twice I developed slurred speech, stammering, and word loss. For a while my memory was so bad I couldn't repeat a telephone number back to you or remember articles I had edited two months before. I also once gained 21 pounds in six weeks (a 15% weight gain). Not one person ever mentioned any of this to me. Not my closest friends, not family members, not…
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Seven things I’ve learned from chronic, undiagnosed illness

chronic unexplained illness, The Weird
During the years I was figuring out the celiac-nutritional deficiencies-liver damage thang, I had a few revelations that probably otherwise wouldn't have been visited unto me until later in life. Several of these were a result of aphasia episodes, wherein my speech became slow and halting and would occasionally just stop mid-sentence. 1. People listen to the pattern of your voice before they listen to what you say. When the aforementioned speech weirdness caused me to break off in mid-sentence, coworkers and friends would laugh as if I'd said something funny, even though I hadn't and even though I clearly had not finished my sentence. Maybe they just thought I was making a half-assed attempt at comic timing. Several years later I discovered with a certain acquaintance that when I,…
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SSRI withdrawal, sleep paralysis, and pseudo-alien abduction attempts

SSRI withdrawal, sleep paralysis, and pseudo-alien abduction attempts

chronic unexplained illness, The Weird
As I've learned more about prescription meds I have re-evaluated the disastrous health symptoms that led me to switch to a gluten-free diet 14 years ago. At the time I had just stopped Zoloft after 18 months. I knew nothing about SSRI withdrawal except that it could make you feel briefly worse if you didn't lower the dose carefully, but since I had always been on the smallest dose available, I thought it didn't apply to me. For more than a decade I assumed that the seizures, insomnia, memory loss, etc. were the culmination of 30 years of malnutrition caused by undiagnosed celiac disease. I still am not entirely clear on what was due to what, but I did learn recently that two bizarre experiences I had during that time…
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Conditions to consider if you’ve been mysteriously sub-par for a long time

chronic unexplained illness, reference, US healthcare system
Updated August 14, 2017. Here's a list of conditions I've investigated over the years as I tried to solve my health problems. You've no doubt heard of some of them but might think the symptoms don't apply to you, or might have been given the wrong test or had your test results evaluated with the wrong lab ranges. All but two of the items listed (Lyme disease and mold / biotoxin poisoning) have the benefit of being easy (if not cheap) to test for or at least rule out. You cannot trust your doctor to know the right lab ranges, so if you do have tests taken, make sure you arrange to have copies of the test results sent to you. I can't be the only person who had a…
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