BY COLLEEN MCCARTNEY
Tagg Magazine
I come from a large New York Irish family and our grandparents didn’t always have health insurance, therefore us having insurance was a big deal to my parents. I was raised if you are sick at all, you go right to the doctor and they’ll fix you up. For some things that was fine, but as I grew up and had different issues to deal with I started to learn that not all doctors were really looking at my overall wellness. They were trying to alleviate a symptom of the real problem going on.
I started looking at other healthy options when my neurologist prescribed a medication for my narcolepsy that landed me in the hospital. I was told that what happened was not a side effect of the medications that I was on; only to find the drug trial studies online telling a very different story. At the time, I was getting allergy shots each week because I was suffering from severe allergies when I spent time outdoors. The shots were so strong that I had to keep an EpiPen on me. I am an extremely active person and spend much of my time outdoors so to be told that I suddenly was no longer able to continue my life outdoors was a total shock. I thought that the point of seeing the doctors and using the medications was to get better, not worse. I realized that the medical industry while great and necessary for some things wasn’t something to trust blindly. I needed to be an advocate for my own wellness because nobody else was going to do that for me.
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Tagg Magazine is a print and online resource for LBT women in the DC Metropolitan and Rehoboth, DE areas.
So true. Far too many of us learn early on in life to blindly trust doctors and the medical field at large. Its silly. We don’t do that with anything else. The medical field is fantastic in some regards, but we should never blindly trust anything just because we’re told to when we’re young.