doctor shopping vs 2nd opinion

[lmkmip67]

I am feeling this especially now. Especially since much of the PANDAS treatments out there are not helping Ian. I think some are thinking, "when will she just give up and realize the kid has OCD, Tourettes and ADHD?? Thankfully I think most of the doctors we are seeing, do realize there is something going on. His therapist did seem to try to break it to me gently that he indeed may have ADHD. I told her awesome! I can treat that! I kept saying, I hope that is all it is. Yet others on the outside, likely do think I am trying to find something medical, and roll their eyes when I say we trying yet another treatment, or diet, etc. My support system of friends (except my very best friends) is gone for this. I have a couple of friends that deal with other issues in their children and understand that this is difficult, they support me just knowing it is hard. If many of us could pin this on a mental illness, I bet we might. But the traditional treatments don't help our kids. So then what, we keep trying to find the right doctors to help. I am seeing it directly, that others on the outside do believe I should just accept the fact my kid has a mental illness. If I could just call this OCD or Tourettes, then I would know what I was dealing with. steroids don't take tourettes away. Antibiotics don't stop tourettes. Illness does not make true OCD flair like crazy. So yeah, we doctor shop. I agree with everyone here. I had to read through quickly. But I do think there is an outside view on what some PANDAS parents do to try to help their kid. I won't stop, I will keep looking. Because my gut says differently.

[kos_mom]

Occam's razor comes to mind. It states that among competing hypotheses, the one that makes the fewest assumptions should be chosen. So our children have a bunch of symptoms. Some of these are medical and some of these are psychiatric. The approach that treats these as different diagnosable bits, with each bit requiring a different treatment, could be appropriate. But often one would be making far more assumptions than an approach that starts out saying maybe all these symptoms are tied together into one underlying illness because they all appeared within the same timeframe.

 

Hayles recently wrote that her son has fever, rash, and tics all appearing around the same time. One of the doctors is quite adamant on dxing Tourette's, and seems quite content to have the other symptoms receive a separate dx apart from that. The medical version of Occam's razor is one I have now had two Pandas neurologists tell me about with regard to my DD's myriad symptoms: it is far more likely that she has one thing than that she has multiple things. Dr. L thinks that one thing is Pandas and is going after that, but if after IVIG weren't not seeing improvement of the sx abx didn't reach, she'll revise.

 

Those of us that have had to go from doctor to doctor in the mental health system only to get an alphabet soup of dxes and a smorgasbord of psych meds that don't work,intuitively feel something that is exactly the opposite of Occam's razor is going on and it just doesn't make sense. Can my child, of all the children in the world, really be all that complicated?

 

We are not doctor shopping; we are searching for Occam's razor.