Help change Health Professionals' attitudes to FM and FM diagnosis - your experiences, please... Sorry, a bit of a long read...

[denny_the_wench]

Background to my question. Just had my second total knee replacement and my lovely Physio Salma at my hospital is particularly interested in trying to change attitudes toward FM in certain health sector groups and has made this a major part of her Senior Physio Thesis for which she is presenting a paper and talk to a conference in a couple of weeks' time. She took time out of her day at the end of each of her shifts to sit and talk to me about some of the experiences I'd had which, after 11 long years, finally led to my diagnosis and start of treatment which has helped tremendously.

This is where you all come in:

She is looking for comments/experiences/attitudes received from the health sector (not work or family) which she can show as one-liners on slides to try and provoke a thought reaction from her audience, and to use as discussion points. As an example these are just a couple of the things that were said to me when I was trying to understand my issues:

GP: Heart palpitations which were s strong that they woke me at night, but which didn't give any significant readings on a 24-hour monitor which I was given to wear (because I didn't have an episode whilst wearing it!!)... "Well I get these as well, you'll just have to learn to live with them"

Consultant Rheumatologist: via a video link during COVID lockdown where all she could really see was my head and shoulders: "Well you are significantly overweight based on your last BMI reading (2 years previous) so you have a high risk of surgical complications and you need to do graded exercise building up to 40 minutes of cardio 3 times a week - oh and my suspicions are you have severe osteoarthritis of the knees... I'm discharging you back to the GP "

(NB - note that less than a year down the line I've had 2 full knee replacements so I'm not sure how I was supposed to be able to do so much cardio with having both fibro AND severe osteo!!)

They don't all have to be bad experiences - if you FINALLY did get someone that listened to you please share how that made you feel... Having changed my GP and finally got to the person who arrived at my diagnosis and spent time and effort helping me balance my medication vs pain killers. I had the chance to speak to her recently on the phone and was able to tell her that she literally saved my life by just believing in me - we were both in tears at the end of the conversation.

I KNOW that you lovely people out there will have had similar experiences - so if you would be willing to share some of them with me - either on here or via a personal message I know that she will be most grateful for your help.... and if she can change a few health workers mindsets towards Fibro more the better!

Over to you... and thank you in advance ♥️♥️♥️