Posted by Gracie2 on January 24, 2002, at 23:00:59
In reply to Re: i have very bad anxiety plse help!!!!!!!!!!, posted by kylie on January 23, 2002, at 15:17:15
A doctor told you to control it by yourself!? The first thing I would do is to find a new doctor.
Obviously you were there to see him because you're unable to control your anxiety and you need help. The only reasonable excuse I can think of for an MD to act in such a manner is that you have given him reason to suspect drug-seeking behaviour, and even then he should have referred you for treatment. Medical school 101 teaches every prospective doctor: first, do no harm. To send you out the door without having offered you help of any kind is, in my opinion, potentially dangerous. For all he knows, you could have gone straight home and drowned all your kids in the
bathtub. Find another doctor.On the other hand, most general practitioners are not trained to diagnose and treat psychiatric disorders. This is not a reflection on their competence as a doctor, only proof that our knowledge of medicine has developed to the point where it has become necessary to divide medical training into sub-specialties, requiring years of extra training and experience. Consequently, you would not want your general practitioner to treat you for cancer, insert a femoral rod, or perform a face-lift. This is beyond the scope of his training, as is psychiatric treatment, and you must be aware that "extra training" consists of more than a few classes and tests. In my years of working at Shriners, which is a teaching hospital, the residents' training was something similiar to an extended form of Marine boot camp.
I have never seen people work so long and so hard under such extreme and prolonged stress, and I'm sure that residents specializing in other areas are exposed to the same conditions. They deserve our admiration and respect.I have an excellent general practitioner and I believe he did exactly what he should have done when I saw him with symptoms like your own. I was suffering from anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia and OCD - not anything like obsessive hand-washing, but the same terrible thoughts running through my head over and over. If my son was late coming home, I thought that meant he was dead in a car accident. If my husband was late coming home, that meant he was having sex with a girlfriend or a prostitute. By the time they arrived home, I had convinced myself that my fears were true and I was either on the phone calling hospitals or ready to throw dishes. Jeez,
I was a mess.My doctor gave me a prescription for Xanax and Seroquel, since I've taken Seroquel in the past and it helps me sleep. He explained that he could not prescribe this medication for me on a regular basis, because I needed to be treated and medicated by a psychiatrist, but he wanted to help me in the interim. He gave me the business card of a psychiatrist that he trusted and told me to make an appointment ASAP.
If you are more comfortable with natural therapies, I recommend the book "Nature's Prozac" by Judith Sachs. While it discusses herbs like St.
John's Wort, it also delves into a wide range of creative alternative therapies such as acupuncture and acupressure, meditation, light therapy, yoga, nutrition, aromatherapy, massage, bioenergetics, and dozens of other natural alternatives to psychiatric medication.In the Western world, we often scoff at Far Eastern traditions and remedies as superstitious
hocus-pocus. I am starting to believe that this is a serious mistake. Their culture is thousands of years older than ours, and an ancient tradition would die out if it had no history of success. To this day, Feng Shui is a practice that the Chinese sincerely believe in.My father is an architectural engineer who specializes in working with a building material that was constructed to "sway" during an earthquake, instead of collapsing. A number of years ago, he was under contract to help rebuild the Bank of Hong Kong (incidentally, a very successful bank). Dad, who was born and raised in St. Louis, was bemused to find himself working alongside a Feng Shui expert, whose approval was mandatory during building plans. At one point, construction was stopped completely -at a cost of thousands of dollars a day - when it was deemed necessary to move the entrance to the bank and the Foo Dogs that "protected" the building. Because the Chinese were afraid that moving the
Foo Dogs would have a detrimental effect, new plans had to be drawn up so that the statues remained in their original position, assuring the continued success of the Bank of Hong Kong.Prehaps there is something more to the spiritual world than we are willing to believe and that here, in the Western world, our obsession with materialism, to make more and more money, to keep up with the Joneses, to be thin and have designer clothes and drive a Lexus and own the biggest house on the block, has contributed immeasurably
to our depression and the sense of being unfulfilled and incomplete. Prehaps it is time for all of us to explore new avenues.
-Gracie
poster:Gracie2
thread:83102
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20020124/msgs/91494.html