Posted by Racer on December 26, 2007, at 1:02:14
In reply to Re: I strongly urge you to see a doctor, posted by bleauberry on December 22, 2007, at 19:11:27
> You might hate lamictal. You might love it. But one thing is for sure, you overcame some serious hurdles to take care of your health. Many people would have just succumbed to the couch and misery. You did research, you were creative, you were purposeful, you set out to take a positive step and you did it. Nice job! Hey in a perfect world we could all afford doctors. And in a perfect world the doctors would not just be experts, but would actually prove it (don't see much of that around here). But it isn't a perfect world. Who is ultimately the one and only person responsible for your healing? You. For me? Me. A doctor's guidance or partnership can be helpful, but can also be hurtful. We see both scenarios here all the time. You just gotta do what you feel is right. The important thing is to take steps. Take a bad situation and make it better. Take roadblocks and go around them. Put a new battery in a clock that has stopped working. Not just sit and wait. You did that. That's positive. I think you did an amazing job.
See, I get the feeling that OldSchool is much younger than we are, and she's stated that she's never been diagnosed with much of anything, besides depressive symptoms. You and most of the rest of us here have seen doctors, been diagnosed with something out of the DSM, had experience with doctors good and bad -- so if we can say, for instance, that Drug A might be a good choice, since Drug A-1+2.3 worked and they're related, or that Drug B is a bad choice, since every other B-related drug has caused us to grow horns on our foreheads, at least we're basing that on our own experience. For someone who is mostly psychotropic naive, and who has never received any official diagnosis -- and is apparently quite young -- self-prescribing just doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
Then again, unlike you, I do tend to figure that my doctor has a context for these medications that I don't have. He went to medical school, so he has a more formally structured understanding of these medications -- that's why I pay him the big bucks, after all. I also figure that, because I suffer from what the government describes as a Serious Mental Illness -- Major Depressive Disorder -- I might not have the clearest picture of what's good for me. I pay my doctor to be more objective regarding my treatment than I can be.
I guess I'm feeling as though it's important to consider the context, including the audience for what we post, when we offer opinions here. I'd hate to offer an opinion to someone who would take it in lieu of a doctor's more educated opinion. That would frighten me, in case it led to someone getting hurt.
poster:Racer
thread:801536
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20071225/msgs/802667.html