Making our own decisions about our health

I am a Lebanese American who is residing in Lebanon in the meantime, but do online coaching.

I agree with your concern regarding the high cost of functional medicine. While setting prices for my coaching program, I also came across the charges for functional medicine sessions. To ensure affordability, I took into consideration the fact that health insurance may not cover these sessions, and set reasonable prices accordingly.

AHRQ website
Article on physician burn out

@Scott RL

I totally hear your great take on the medical establishment.

I was told that I could not interpret or go with a study on Pub Med as I was not a doctor and then he discounted the study.

I am the one that is dealing with breast lymphedema and the study said that calcium channel blockers can cause lymphedema and lymph problems.
My pharmacist said calcium channel blockers would make it worse….when he read it too.

Am getting nowhere…

I find it's verry hard to have my MD listen to anything I have to say. His reply "who's the doctor?"

Hear hear @ibdsupportcoach ! Qualifications aren’t automatically a ticket to knowing what a person is going through, nor a ticket to knowledge; it is only a formalisation of a process of learning that a person has gone through, with no assurance as to the quality of their knowledge or comprehensiveness within (which often does include lots of technical info, but very little experiential info).
Having formal qualifications in allied health, I can assure you that when I graduated, there were still some of the grad class unable to do their job, while there were some of us highly competent both technically and practically, who could run rings around others with the same piece of paper. The difference - besides diligence in learning - was lived experiences in what we learned, and how we applied that lived experiences learning to complement and enhance service delivery. The system isn’t set up to facilitate using your personal experience alongside your professional qualifications, and this is a massive area of advantage for the sole development of lived experience support exactly as you’ve described. I also use my lived experience (not my qualification) as a means of coaching, and I do not have a qualification in that, but it helps people enormously. The realm I am in with regards to this is peer guide support. I have not any formal quals in this area, but it’s highly effective in helping people. How do you get ‘qualified’ in telling your lived and learned experience? By refining and practicing your craft of learning more about helping yourself, trial and error with those learnings with yourself, then sharing what works in a responsible and caring way - from what I’ve read in your posts, you’re highly ‘qualified’ in sharing lived experiences as a support coach!
I live with lymphocytic colitis and was on Entyvio (and a bunch of other meds), and once I was out of a terrible flare, I worked diligently to reduce all meds using lifestyle and diet, along with an immune approach that was quite novel, and that process took me 12 months. Now, I am in remission.
Reading your post reminded me of all the things I did to get better. I think you sharing this knowledge you’ve accumulated is a great asset to the IBD community! Yes it would be nice to have a piece of paper to satisfy the paper hungry out there, but a support coach in a niche area would need to have a teacher in that same niche area - where do you find them, and where do they get their qualification..? After a while of thinking about this, getting a ‘qualification seems a nonsensical process (said with tongue in cheek here, but I think to try to get a qualification as an IBD support coach seems moot), and the process you’ve undertaken is much more relevant and useful in terms of providing support coaching delivery.
I used to be a teacher, and I had the privilege of having students in my class that had no formal quals, but they’d been diligent in their learning and life experience - they knew enough to sit final exams on their first day in class, and I often learned things that I could never find in the research or text books that are solely written and distributed by academics mostly devoid of lived experience (you can see the perpetuation of technical learning from research outcomes, through the teaching of teachers, to students, into practitioners; this is where what you do is essential to wholistic approaches of care).
Thanks for sharing that very important perspective demonstrating how an inclusive approach is absolutely complementary to formal medical care, and provides so much more than what a medical consultation can do for a person.

I agree; your own research, your own experience, and the docs opinion are equally important.
Any medical ‘professional’ that dismisses me, my knowledge, my research, or my credibility as a person, I get up, tell them I’m not paying for insults, and that they are not meeting their service delivery standards as set out by their insurer, their association memberships, and their industry board. Then I toss my research on their desk for them to review and learn from. Then I walk out and find someone else. I also have some experience in reviewing research information and assessing quality of research findings, so I do have an advantage here, however if any person brings some information they’ve found to a medic, they have a responsibility to review it diligently, and support the patient in decision making around its relevance to their situation and how they may or may not be able to help in light of the evidence presented. Anything less and them and their qualification are merely office decoration 😉

Amen!

So true

How very condescending.