I knew exactly where this conversation with new patient, Mary, was headed (for me). In fact, when I read through my associate Brett Eaton’s intake notes, Brett herself had made Mary’s diagnosis during her first visit to WholeHealth Chicago. She was seeing me for ‘confirmation’ and to discuss treatment. But equally adept diagnosticians are any of the WholeHealth Chicago team: Samantha, Mark, Dr. Samsami, Jordan, Wendy, Dr. Halland, Dr. Agrawal, Dr. Scott, Dr. Lazell, Dr. Musso, Vicki, Dr. Crosbie in Florida.
Hey, Dr. E., aren’t you getting a bit too full of yourself?
Well, I’d agree with you, except ironically, Mary herself had made her own diagnosis and couldn’t get any of the specialists to listen to her.
One big difference between “them” (conventionally trained specialists) and “us” (holistically ‘whole person oriented’) is that “we listen harder”. I went to medical school in London for a semester (yes, it was that great!) and a valuable lesson I learned from a professor who held all the tests and scans that patients were being inundated with was this: “If you just listen hard enough and long enough, then your patient will tell you her diagnosis.”
Mary was trying to do just that. Only nobody was listening.
Mary, 45 years old, has always been reasonably well until two years ago (2021); she starts feeling irregularity of her heartbeat; she tells her primary care doc who refers her to a cardiologist.
Having excellent insurance, she gets the best evaluation money can buy but nothing is found. “Your heart is fine. Yes, it is beating irregularly but it’s working well. Come back in six months.”
She tells him, “I am having these weird electrical shocks down my arms and also terrible heartburn. I’ve never had heartburn. I’m tired and I can’t think straight.”
“Oh, jeez!”, he says (or some such expression of empathy), “but those aren’t my fields. Let my nurse set you up with a neurologist, a gastroenterologist, and a psychiatrist.”
You discover these three appointments will occur four months in the future, be cancelled and rescheduled but ultimately result in scans, scopings, more bloods tests, and no answers. Since your joints are really beginning to hurt you schedule with a rheumatologist who orders more blood tests drawing more blood than you thought you had. The results are unrevealing. You ask if you could have “long COVID”; he asks “Did you have COVID?”. You answer that you don’t think you did, but you might have.
“Oh, you’d know if you had COVID. Nope, this isn’t long COVID.”
Nevertheless, since you’re getting no better, you schedule an appointment and wait three months for an appointment in the same medical center’s long COVID Clinic.
After your visit, you realize the “clinic” has been created to gather information about patients who might have long COVID. They tell you that you ‘probably” have long COVID but since there are no FDA approved treatments, just eat healthfully and get plenty of rest.
Now, click to this article from Nature magazine, listing the symptoms of long COVID. I want you to do this to understand that every group of symptoms will get to do a different specialist which is exactly what happened to poor Mary. Moreover, despite electronic medical records, the specialists don’t communicate with each other. The term for this is ‘information silos’ and makes healthcare (as Mary will be more than happy to tell you) “very inefficient”.
SO HOW ARE THE WHOLEHEALTH CHICAGO PRACTITIONERS DIFFERENT?
Two significant ways:
ONE: We pay meticulous attention to the whole person. Mary really was healthy her entire life until two years ago when her body was thrown into a Cuisinart of symptoms. What was happening at the time? COVID, of course. So our practitioners began asking about all the other possible manifestations of long COVID (electric shocks, joint pain, brain fog, fatigue, etc., etc.).
Did she remember having COVID? Of course not! Many people had really mild cases manifesting as a bad cold or just didn’t want to bother getting tested.
TWO: We will recommend treatments (nutritional supplements, herbs, infusions) that are actually being used worldwide but aren’t going through FDA testing because they’re in the public domain. Why aren’t these offered at the long COVID clinics? Because they’re not FDA approved and every treatment has to pass a hospital’s Pharmacy Committee.
Because severe cases of long Covid (especially the memory symptoms) can cause long term damage, we suggest patients with severe symptoms get to work. Here’s a recent article on brain damage from COVID. And for our Long COVID Treatment Plan, click here and schedule a visit with one of our excellent practitioners.
Be well,
David Edelberg, MD