Above I mentioned how the change in narrative around pain medications is affecting our treatment and part of what has caused this change is the drug seeker narrative. 

Unfortunately, it’s true that opiods at one point were over prescribed but this was to people who had no long term need for them. They are after all addictive but what happens when you are someone who has chronic pain that is never going away? 

We’ve become obsessed with weeding out the fakers, so much so that we are actually harming those who genuinely need help.

With the rise of the internet and the ability to google your symptoms many have been turning to self diagnosis but what really is it and why is important? 

We’ve all heard about doctor google and how you probably shouldn’t just google symptoms as more often than not the internet will tell you that you are clearly dying of the plague, but why is it such a hot topic in the chronic illness community? 

Self diagnosis is when a patient uses research to find information on a condition that best fits the symptoms they are experiencing. Often this happens because the patient either doesn’t have access to healthcare or they do but either due to discrimination or fear they are unable to seek professional care. 

COVID-19 has ripped through our lives and turned everything upside down but there’s something else going on that until now hadn’t been brought to the public’s attention, and that’s the idea that you can get sick and never get better. 

You might have started to see it in the news or online, ‘post viral fatigue’ seems to be cropping up everywhere but what does it really mean and why is it linked to chronic illness? 

Post viral fatigue is more commonly linked to M.E. / CFS. Although we aren’t 100% sure why it happens, in a lot of M.E. / CFS cases the patient will become sick with a virus, mostly Epstein Barr (more commonly known as mumps, mono or glandular fever) and after the infection has gone away they are left with the debilitating fatigue and other symptoms. 

Why we are now seeing this mentioned in conjunction with COVID-19 is that there are a number of patients, dubbed long haulers, that seem to be having the same issues as M.E. / CFS patients.