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Why Your Doctor May Misdiagnose Your Pain
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Free information on self-healing from chronic pain 

by Ingrid Bacci 

www.ingridbacci.com 

            If doctors mis-diagnose or mis-treat your pain, you’re the one who suffers. It’s to your benefit to understand why and how this can happen, and to be sure you get the best of care.

            Here’s a story of how one of my clients was misdiagnosed, causing her needless fear and anxiety, as well as ongoing pain. When I first saw her she was quite depressed because her doctor had told her she had Fibromyalgia. As a result, she saw herself as the victim of an incomprehensible disease and was on a mixture of pain killers and anti-inflammatories to treat this disease. But Fibromyalgia is not a disease. In fact, it’s just a label that doctors have invented to describe soft tissue pain of unknown origin. When a doctor tells you that you have Fibromyalgia, he’s saying nothing more than something you already know: you hurt. But unfortunately, when medical professionals apply fancy labels to your symptoms, it is easy to start thinking that you are the victim of some process you cannot control. The truth is very different. Most cases of Fibromyalgia can definitely be cured with systematic physical rebalancing and emotional healing work. The doctor who diagnosed my client took away her personal power by giving her the impression that she had a disease and suggesting purely passive treatment through pain killers and anti-inflammatories. When she adopted a different view, and began working with her emotional and physical habits, she healed and is now doing quite well.

            Another client who came for back pain had spent a year being subjected to X-rays, MRI’s, cortisone shots, pain killers, spinal taps for meningitis, and various tests for multiple sclerosis. All because she had pain in her shoulder! While the tests all came out negative, you can imagine how this poor woman felt while she waited for the results and worried whether she had a degenerative disease like multiple sclerosis. It’s enough to make anyone seize up in a panic and take to bed! Needless to say, this woman’s back pain worsened during all these medical trials as she imagined her possibly dark fate.

            Yet for this woman, as for so many of us, the real cause of the back pain was quite simple. Emotional stresses in her life were causing her to tense up so much that her shoulders and neck began to hurt on a regular basis. Her solution lay neither in steroids nor in pain killers, nor in treatment for a deadly disease, but in looking at and resolving the causes of her emotional distress.

            Why do doctors frequently misdiagnose pain issues, or subject their patients to needless and traumatizing tests in search of dread diseases? There are three reasons.

1)      Doctors tend to ignore the emotional causes of pain. We all know from practical experience that when we are under stress our bodies suffer: we get indigestion, or headaches, or back pain. To heal from these is to address the sources of stress. By medicating you or looking for a disease to explain your condition, doctors often avoid the real issue and sometimes simply increase your stress.

2)      The medical profession is used to looking for and treating disease. Come into a doctor’s office with a symptom and all of a sudden the doctor is looking for a life-threatening disease. In the vast majority of cases, however, the problem is simple and so is the cure. Meanwhile, the patient suffers from terrible anxiety: not exactly a good recipe for health.

3)      Doctors are not trained to perceive or treat the whole of the person who comes into their office. Let me clarify. Each client of mine who has back pain has that pain for unique reasons. The particular muscles or bones involved are unique, as is the particular history behind that pain. To treat that pain is to work with the whole person: psychologically, mentally, biochemically and physically. To help someone heal, you have to take in the whole body and the whole person. Similarly, to heal yourself, you have to consider all the variables affecting your pain: your lifestyle, your habits of movement, your alignment, your emotional and mental stresses, and so on. If you are willing to do this, you can over time fully empower your life. That means you can be healthy: emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually. Isn’t that what you want?

Learning how to be optimally healthy and free of pain is a process. To learn more, please visit my website www.ingridbacci.com and look at the many free articles on pain and stress reduction. If you have chronic pain, please also consider purchasing my book Effortless Pain Relief, available under the product icon of my website. As someone who cured herself of crippling pain, and who has been teaching others to do so for thirty years, I know what I am talking about. Take advantage of what I have spent a lifetime learning, and free yourself from having to start at ground zero. In the meantime, blessings to you, and may 2009 bring us all the rewards of meeting our life’s challenges successfully, and of learning to live more effortlessly!

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